Jihadist Video Shows Boy Beheading Man

Ghulam Sakhi, father of a militant Ghulam Nabi shows the video grab picture of his son distributed by executioners in the area, during an interview with The Associated Press at his home in a remote village Kili Faqiran in southwestern Pakistan, Thursday April 19, 2007. A video received by The Associated Press this week records the grisly death of Ghulam Nabi, a militant accused of betraying a top deputy to Taliban supreme leader Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Osmani who was killed in a December airstrike in Afghanistan. Sakhi, said his son was a loyal Taliban member who had fought in Afghanistan and sheltered its leaders in the mud-walled family compound - and said he wanted to avenge his death. (AP Photo/Abdul Rahman) (Abdul Rahman - AP)

He blames the Taliban and wants to avenge his son's death.

"The Taliban are not mujahedeen. They are not fighting for the cause of Islam," the 70-year-old said. "If I got my hands on them I would kill them and even tear their flesh with my own teeth."

Qari Yousaf Ahmadi, who claims to speak for the Taliban, told AP he had no information about Nabi or the video. None of the group's commanders he contacted could confirm the execution, he said.

The method of Nabi's death was not unusual for Pakistan's lawless tribal regions. Suspected informers are regularly found beheaded and dumped along the side of the road in the lawless, mountainous regions along the Afghan-Pakistani border where al-Qaida and Taliban militants find sanctuary.

But such al-Qaida-style killings are rarely featured in the Taliban's increasingly frequent propaganda videos. The use of a child to conduct the beheading stands out even among those filmed by militants in Iraq.

"This is outright barbarism," Iqbal Haider, secretary-general of the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, said after viewing the video. "Whosoever has committed this, whether they are Taliban or anybody else or any Afghan or al-Qaida or anybody, they are enemy No. 1 of the Muslims."

The video accuses Nabi of responsibility for a U.S. airstrike that killed Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Osmani, who was regarded as one of the top three associates of Omar, the Taliban supreme leader. He was hit while traveling by car in Afghanistan's Helmand province Dec. 19.

Osmani was the highest-ranking Taliban leader to die since the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan that ousted the hard-line regime in late 2001 for refusing to hand over bin Laden following the Sept. 11 terror attack on the United States.

The U.S. military said at the time that Osmani's death was a serious blow to militant operations, and NATO commanders said this week that a feared spring offensive had yet to materialize.

Sakhi, a retired mosque preacher with a long gray beard, spoke unashamedly of his son's Taliban affiliation and wept twice during an interview in his simple home at the foot of a mountain valley in Baluchistan province.

He said Nabi fought against the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance that helped U.S. forces to victory in Afghanistan.

After returning to Pakistan, Nabi ran a religious school in the Baluchistan capital of Quetta and had regularly sheltered both Osmani and Dadullah at the family compound, the father said.