The family of former prosecutor Mohammad Naqi Taqi, who was forced out when Taliban militants took power in August 2021, has confirmed his death in eastern Afghanistan, saying it appears he was brutally slain by unknown assailants.
Taqi's son told RFE/RL's Radio Azadi on November 22 that his father and aunt were killed in the eastern Nangarhar Province this week after being invited to a celebration in the region.
He said the family doesn't know the identity of the killers and he didn't elaborate on whether the family knew the individuals who had invited his father and aunt to the event.
He added that the family identified their dead bodies after they were first discovered on the side of a road in Nangarhar’s rural Behsud district on November 20.
"They were poisoned first and then tortured because traces of severe torture could be seen on their dead bodies," he told Radio Azadi.
Taqi, a lawyer, had served in the Afghan Attorney General's Office during the fallen pro-Western government and had investigated high-profile cases.
Like hundreds of former prosecutors, he was forced to relinquish his job after hard-line Taliban militants seized power as U.S.-led international forces withdrew from the country.
Instead of fleeing Afghanistan like most other former prosecutors -- who became targets of the criminals they investigated or helped convict -- Taqi stayed in Kabul.
Some of the prosecutors, now living in exile in Pakistan, are resisting being deported back to the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.
Abid Andrabi, a member of the Afghanistan Prosecutors Association, said that before Taqi's killing, some 37 former prosecutors and others working for the Attorney General's Office and the judiciary had been killed in Afghanistan since the Taliban returned to power.
"The general amnesty the Taliban has touted since returning to power is being completely disregarded," he told Radio Azadi. "Taliban members have been settling personal scores with the military and civilian employees of the previous government."
Afghan human rights activists allege that the killings of former government officials in the country are on the rise.
"These murders are increasing daily, which is deeply worrying," Nargis Sadat, a human rights campaigner, told Radio Azadi.
In a report in August, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan said the Taliban militants ruling Afghanistan had carried out more than 200 extrajudicial killings of former government officials and security forces since August 2021.