Once the shooting began, it took more than five minutes to kill the last of the 15 condemned men.

Stumbling blindly into one another in the darkness, hooded, shackled and handcuffed, some had somehow survived the automatic fire from a ten-man firing squad at almost point-blank range.

However, when the final coup de grace had been applied and the night was silent again, it was clear that one man was missing. Timur Shah, perhaps Afghanistan’s most infamous criminal, sentenced to die for kidnap, rape and murder, had escaped in the mêlée that was the country’s first official execution for three years.

“It was a grotesque mockery of justice,” Sam Zia-Zarifi, Human Rights Watch research director for Asia, said. “It was cruel and inhuman. The legal systems in even the wealthiest nations are incapable of providing justice when it comes to capital punishment. Afghanistan certainly can’t.”

The slaughter occurred at 9.30pm on October 7 on the eastern outskirts of Kabul. Only now can the full story be told. The condemned prisoners were killed in a chaotic, group turkey shoot. And Timur Shah had escaped with the complicity of corrupt guards.

A 16th man remained alive, hidden among mutinous prisoners in the notorious Policharki jail in the capital.

The bodies of the slain were so badly mutilated that in some cases identification was impossible.

The Afghan Attorney-General is investigating claims that some paid for their execution places to be taken by low-level prisoners.

A senior prosecutor charged with observing the execution, Sarbeland (he goes by a single name), saw the whole event at first hand. He is the first witness to describe it publicly in detail. Interviewed by The Timesin the Attorney-General’s office in Kabul, he said that from the moment he arrived at Policharki that afternoon, procedures were a shambles.

“I confirmed the condemned prisoners matched the photographs in their files,” he said. “But one was already missing. He had taken refuge among another group of prisoners in a different wing who put up resistance when we tried to get him back.”

This prisoner, Khayoum, a convicted murderer, still remains at large within the jail. Authorities, who clearly have lost control of some areas of the prison, are still puzzling over how best to seize him without triggering a bloodbath.

The thousands of Soviet-era executions within Policharki had always occurred in a specialised wing of the jail. The Afghan authorities, perhaps with the current level of the prison unrest in mind, instead drove the condemned men in two vehicles to Pulegun. Here they ran into their next obstacle.

The site was near an Afghan national army camp, and the soldiers wanted nothing to do with the execution and ordered them away.

After hours of failed negotiations, the condemned men were driven to Dog Fort, a desert site at the foot of a mountain, where dogs were taught to sniff out mines.

The prisoners were unloaded in darkness and made to stand near a 4ft (1.2m) earthen wall. After their sentences were confirmed, their hands were released, one by one, to sign their wills, before being tied again. (Many were illiterate and signed by thumb-printing the document.)

It was obvious at this point to Mr Sarbeland that Timur Shah was receiving different treatment. He had only a narrow blindfold while the other prisoners were hooded. His hands were tied in front of him, the others’ behind them.

A row then broke out when the condemned men asked to be uncuffed so that they could pray one last time.

As this went on, Mr Sarbeland said, Timur Shah stepped a few feet away, ostensibly to urinate. Instead he flung himself over the low wall. Other prisoners started to run. The shooting began.

“It took between five and ten minutes for them to kill everybody,” Mr Sarbeland said. “Then we went to look for Timur Shah. We searched over a mile radius, but found nothing.”

The bodies were collected. With multiple close-range gunshot wounds, many had their faces blown off and were unidentifiable. Foreign diplomats suggested later that some of the bodies had also been bayoneted, though Mr Sarbeland denied this.

Among the dead, whose crimes ranged from murder to rape and robbery, was Reza Khan, one of those responsible for the killing of four journalists on the road between Jalalabad and Kabul in November 2001.

Three prison guards have been arrested for complicity in Timur Shah’s escape. Leading the investigation, Mr Sarbeland discovered that one set of leg-shackle keys was missing – perhaps given to Shah before he leapt over the wall.

The Afghan public has been little disturbed by the controversy. Tired of criminality, many people say that there should be more executions.

Bloody legacy

— The only other official execution since the Taleban was ousted was in 2004 when Abdullah Shah, a military commander, was shot after being jailed on 20 counts of murder

— Before the removal of the Taleban in 2001, executions were considerably more frequent. The group’s strict interpretation of the Koran meant that the methods of the often public killings were brutal. Three men convicted of sodomy in 1998 were ordered to be buried alive under a pile of stones. They were allowed to live if they survived for 30 minutes

Source: agencies

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