[Before the execution, a Taliban mullah, his words amplified by a loudspeaker truck, said it was a special day for Kabul. "Today we carry out the first execution in our capital under the rule of the Taliban Islamic Movement of Afghanistan. Let this be a lesson to others," he said and then listed the range of standard Sharia punishments for wrongdoers: amputations for various wrongdoings, stonings-to-death for adultery and lashings for unmarried couples engaging in sex.]

Amid the murmuring of the crowd, it was impossible to hear the words that came tumbling from Ghulam. Hands raised before him, palms up, he might have been praying or perhaps making a last desperate plea for mercy from the man advancing toward him with a raised Kalashnikov rifle.

A decree of the Taliban's Supreme Court read at the execution detailed Ghulam's crime, saying that he, another man named Rohullah and a young girl, Roya, had broken into the apartment of Mohammad Alif and used rope to garrote Alif's pregnant wife and three children, a boy and two girls aged 9, 6 and 3. Neighbors said later that the 15 year old Roya, seeking money for her wedding to a teen-age boyfriend, had enticed Ghulam and Rohullah into the robbery after she learned that Alif, a part-time money-changer, kept piles of banknotes valued at about $1,000 in the apartment.

Under the Sharia, the Islamic code of justice imposed by the Taliban in the three-quarters of Afghanistan under their control, Ghulam was entitled to entreat his executioner for a reprieve. And the executioner, whose pregnant wife and three small children Ghulam was convicted of killing last year, was entitled to forgive the condemned man. In that case, Ghulam would have walked a free man from the Kabul soccer field declared his place of execution.

But his executioner, the bereaved Mohammed Alif, had waited for this moment since December 1995, when he had arrived home to find his entire family slain. Now walking briskly forward, he dropped to one knee, leveled and fired a two second automatic rifle burst into his target. Three thousand hardened Taliban fighters gave a stifled cheer, a dull "ha, ha, ha" that seemed a counterpoint to the bullets striking the convicted and violent murderer of four.

Ghulam fell backwards and lay quite still, his filigreed cotton skullcap still in place. A Taliban cleric examined the fallen man, then directed Mr. Alif to insure there would be no survival. Alif stood at the murderer's flank and fired another burst into his chest. The body twitched, the crowd offered another stifled cheer, and a doctor made an examination to verify the execution was complete.

Dr. Alam, a 26-year-old physician who attended the execution and spoke later for the Taliban said the two men had been sentenced to death early in 1996 by the government of President Burnahuddin Rabbani, ousted by the Taliban in September. Roya received a three-year jail term because of her youth. But, he said, all three had escaped when guards abandoned Kabul's prisons to join the exodus of Rabbani officials on the night the Taliban entered the capital. Only Ghulam of the three has thus far been recaptured, his death sentence reviewed and confirmed by a Taliban court.

Mr. Alif, the aggrieved husband-father-executioner, told Taliban fighters gathered about him that he was pleased to have been given his rights under "qisas," an Arabic term meaning a relative's right of revenge. "But I will not be fully satisfied until the other criminals have been caught," he said. And if their families give them up, he would consider forgiveness, but if they did not, he would insist on the full punishment, at least against Rohullah, the second of the condemned men. "It is my right under qisas," he said.

When Dr. Alam, the physician, was asked what he thought of the West's condemnation of the Taliban for exacting medieval forms of punishment, he became agitated and cut off the exchange. Then, turning back and shaking his finger, he said that Westerners were in no position to judge. "You have no qisas in the United States, and none in Europe," he said, his voice rising. "And look what you have -- a lot of women raped every day, and a lot of people murdered."