The Afghan Taliban religious police on Friday arrested 64 people for gambling and staging dog, quail and cock fights in a Kabul city slum, the official Radio Sharia reported Saturday, reported (AFP)
The ruling Taliban mouth-piece said personnel of the ministry for fostering virtue and preventing vice, better known as the religious police, caught the accused "red-handed" in a private house in the Shor Bazar area.
"Perpetrators of these unpermissible deeds were handed over to the claws of law without delay," it said.
The station said the religious police personnel, who patrol the once liberal Afghan capital in Japanese pick-ups, were "endeavouring to totally uproot vice and establish virtue".
The Islamic militia has banned contests of dogs, cocks, quails and partridges, a traditional pastime in many parts of the country before the advent of the Taliban.
The fundamentalist force controls most of Afghanistan and has imposed a puritanical interpretation of the Islamic Sharia law, banning music, cinema, video and photography of living beings.
The religious police on Friday asked sports clubs to hold their daily activities from dawn until late afternoon so that the athletes could have more time to attend to prayers, the radio said.
Transactions come to a halt in the Afghan capital when shopkeepers are ordered to shut their shops and congregate in mosques for prayers five times a day.
Violators get their shops sealed for five days by mobile patrols of the religious police.
The ruling militia has barred women from working outside the home or from attending school and decreed that they cover themselves from head to toe in public.
Men have to wear untrimmed beards and shun western fashion – (AFP)
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