Young offender 'hanged in Iran'

Human rights groups say Iran has executed another juvenile offender, despite apparently saying recently that it was halting such executions.
Human Rights Watch said an Afghan national, convicted of murder at the age of 17, was executed last week.
The central judiciary has not confirmed the news from Isfahan. It would be the seventh such execution in 2008.
Iran appeared to say it was ending the practice last month, but later said victims' families had the final say.
The New York-based Human Rights Watch said the Afghan man, identified as Gholamreza H, was hanged in Isfahan province on 30 October.
He was 19 when the execution was carried out, but had been convicted for a murder he committed in November 2006 as a 17-year-old.
Retaliation, not execution
Human Rights Watch says 26 juvenile offenders have been executed in Iran since January 2005, out of a worldwide total of 32 known executions.
The execution was announced by judicial officials in Isfahan province, the group says, although at a recent news conference in Tehran, the judiciary spokesman said he was not aware of the case.
The Iranian government recently announced an end to child executions, but a few days later a spokesman made it clear that did not include so called "blood money" or "Qeisas" cases, which make up the vast majority of executions.
According to the Justice Ministry spokesman, these cases are not technically "execution" but "retaliation" on behalf of victims' families which is sanctioned by Islamic law and cannot be repealed.

US air raid kills Afghan civilians

Villagers in southern Afghanistan say that dozens of civilians, including women and children attending a wedding party in Kandahar, have been killed in a US air raid.Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, condemned the killings and said on Wednesday that 40 people were killed and 28 wounded as a result of an air raid in the Shah Wali Kot district of Kandahar province.
US officials in Afghanistan confirmed that a number of civilians had been killed and said that an investigation was under way."We acknowledge some civilians have been injured and some may have been killed," Colonel Greg Julian, a spokesman for the US forces in Afghanistan, told the AFP news agency.
'Collateral damage'"I can't confirm numbers," Julian said, adding the military regretted every time civilians became "collateral damage" when troops tried to take out anti-government fighters.Witnesses accompanying the wounded to Kandahar's main hospital said the dead included at least 23 children and 10 women."Seven women, including the bride, and three children were admitted to hospital in Kandahar," an AFP news agency reporter said.

Local residents said the attack was carried out after Taliban fighters fired on a US convoy in the Shah Wali Kot area of the province on Monday.David Chater, reporting for Al Jazeera from Afghanistan, said he had been told by a cameraman that a coalition patrol had gone through a village and was fired on by Taliban fighters."As a result of that Taliban fire they called in closed air support and there was a wedding party going on in that village - there were some 90 people in a house - and the missile landed there," he said.
Grief-stricken relativeRoozben Khan, the father of the bride, said he had lost six relatives."I lost two sons, two grandsons, a nephew, my mother and a cousin," Khan said.His daughter was among seven of his relatives who were wounded. The groom survived but his father, mother and sister were killed, he said.Mullah Mohammad Asim, the village cleric, said he had counted 36 bodies."They bombed six to seven houses. They pounded and fired into the village from afternoon until midnight," Asim said."At midnight, the Americans came and they took the men out of the houses and handcuffed them. But when they saw the death and the destruction, they removed the handcuffs and told us to take the wounded to hospital," he said.The bombing is the latest in a string of incidents in which the US military has been accused of attacking innocent civilians.The attacks have caused major friction between the US and the Afghan government.

Source: Al Jazeera and agencies