Couple stoned to death by Mali islamists

Ansar Dine, an al-Qaeda-linked Islamic militant group in control of northern Mali stoned to death a couple. They were accused of engaging in extramarital affairs, the group's spokesman said.

The couple was publicly executed in the remote town of Aguelhok, near the vast West African nation's northern border with Algeria, on Sunday, a spokesman for the Ansar Dine group said.

"I was there. The Islamists took the unmarried couple to the centre of Aguelhok. The couple was placed in two holes and the Islamists stoned them to death," a local government official told the AFP news agency.
"Our men on the ground in Aguelhok applied sharia (Islamic law)," said Sanda Ould Bounama, the spokesman for Ansar Dine, reached by telephone on Monday.

"They both died right away and even asked for this application. We don't have to answer to anyone over the application of sharia," he said.

Most people living in northern Mali have long practised Islam, but frustrations with the strict form of sharia being imposed by Islamists have sparked several protests in recent months.

Ansar Dine and well-armed allies, including al-Qaeda splinter group MUJWA, have hijacked a separatist uprising by local Tuareg rebels and now control two-thirds of Mali's desert north. The territory includes the regions of Gao, Kidal and Timbuktu.

Western and African governments are struggling to muster a response to the crisis. Politicians in the capital Bamako continue to squabble over how the country should be governed after a March coup removed the country's president.
Source: Reuters