New York Times
Published: July 30, 2012
BAMAKO, Mali
— Islamists in control of a town in northern Mali stoned a couple to death
after accusing them of having children outside of marriage, a local official
who was one of several hundred witnesses to the killings said Monday.
The official
said the bearded Islamists, armed with Kalashnikov rifles, brought the couple
into the center of the town of Aguelhok from about 12 miles away in the
countryside. The young man and woman were forced into holes about four feet
deep, with their heads protruding, and then stoned to death at about 5 a.m.
Sunday, the official said.
“They put
them into the holes, and then they started throwing big rocks, until they were
dead,” the official said, speaking by satellite phone from the remote desert
town near the Algerian border.
“It was
horrible,” he said, noting that the woman had moaned and cried out and that her
partner had yelled something indistinct during the attack. “It was inhuman.
They killed them like they were animals.”
The official
insisted that he not to be identified because he said “our lives are in danger
here.” The official said many of the 2,000 people in Aguelhok had already begun
leaving, crossing the border into Algeria, as a result of Sunday’s stoning.
The stoning
was the Islamists’ most brutal reported act of repression so far. Refugees from
the north have given numerous accounts of public whippings and beatings for
alleged violations of Shariah law in the main towns of Timbuktu and Gao.
All of
northern Mali, a vast area larger than France, most of it desert, is in the
hands of Islamists linked to Al Qaeda, after a rebellion against the Malian
government that began in January. The rebellion began as a new iteration of a
decades-long struggle by a nomadic ethnic group, the Tuaregs, to gain autonomy
from a central government based in the south that it had long accused of
neglect and persecution.
But the
Tuaregs were soon overtaken by their de facto allies, a local Islamist
movement, the Ansar Dine, or Defenders of the Faith, which itself was allied
with Al Qaeda. Ansar Dine now controls the region, in alliance with another
radical Islamist splinter group, the Mujao, or the Movement for Oneness and
Jihad in West Africa. The groups share the goal of imposing an extreme form of
Shariah law on the people of northern Mali.
The official
in Aguelhok said the rural couple were heard to protest, faintly, that the
children — the youngest a baby of 6 months — were not even theirs. But the men
who executed them said the couple had been guilty of a serious crime, and
deserved punishment.
“All they
said was, it was the law of Shariah that prescribed it, that God willed it,”
the official recalled. He said the execution had lasted about 15 minutes, but
the woman died quickly, after crying out.
In silence,
more than 300 people from the town watched. “The people protested, that no law
could possibly prescribe such a thing,” the official said. “On the slightest
pretext, they execute people.”
Aguelhok
drew notoriety early in the rebellion, in January, as the place where dozens of
Malian Army soldiers were apparently summarily executed, according to human
rights groups. Some had their hands tied behind their backs and their throats
cut.
A protest
over the executions by angry soldiers’ wives in the capital, Bamako, in early
February was an early sign that the government was in trouble. The government
was later brought down by a military junta in a coup d’état at the end of
March, allowing the Tuaregs and Islamists to overrun the north.
The south is
still in disorder, with the junta still active behind an appointed civilian
government whose powers remain uncertain. On Friday, the interim president,
Dioncounda Traoré, returned to Bamako from Paris after an absence of over two
months following an attack by a mob — some said orchestrated by elements in the
military — that left him seriously injured.
In a
televised speech on Sunday, Mr. Traoré announced a reorganization of the
government with the aim of recovering the troubled nation’s unity.
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