Afghan Taliban deny executing eloping pair: report

KABUL (Reuters) - Afghanistan's Taliban on Wednesday denied involvement in the execution of a pair of young lovers as reported by Afghan officials, a media outlet said.

Provincial officials of Nimroz said the Taliban militants publicly shot dead a man and girl in the province Monday for eloping when she was already engaged to marry someone else.

"We do not know any thing about the incident," the Afghan Islamic Press quoted a Taliban spokesman, Qari Mohammad Yousuf, as saying.

The district where the incident happened is largely out of control of the government. One provincial official Tuesday said a group of pro-Taliban clerics had carried out the executions after hunting the pair down a week after they eloped.

Afghan officials have given few details about the incident which came a day after the Taliban shot dead a female member of the provincial council in Kandahar a southern city.

When in power from 1996 until their ouster by U.S.-backed Afghan forces in 2001, Taliban Islamists frequently staged public executions and floggings of adulterers, thieves and murderers.

A Taliban-led insurgency against Afghanistan's U.S.-backed government has grown in recent years, and the militants have occasionally carried out their form of justice, including public executions, in towns and villages under their control.

(Reporting by Sayed Salahuddin in Kabul; Editing by David Fox)