The Taliban's chief justice yesterday warned that eight foreigners on trial for preaching Christianity in Afghanistan could be hanged if found guilty.
Mr Mawlawi Noor Mohammad Saqib spoke on the second day of the trial of the two Americans, two Australians and four Germans.
"We will give them punishment according to Islamic law, whether imprisonment or hanging," he told the Pakistan-based news agency Afghan Islamic Press (AIP).
"We will punish them according to the laws they have broken. If they have broken the law and should be hanged then we will punish them like that."
The aid workers were arrested along with 16 Afghan colleagues more than four weeks ago, but the charges and likely punishment have not been fully explained. The Afghans are likely to face a separate legal process.
At the end of the second day of deliberations between judges and senior Islamic scholars, which constitutes a trial in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, Mr Saqib reiterated that the accused were innocent until proven guilty.
"The punishment will be decided by the highly qualified judges and ulemas (scholars) and only if the accused are proven guilty," he said in a statement.
He said the trial would be fair, although in a speech at a mosque on August 10th he called for "exemplary punishment" to "end such un-Islamic practice by any foreign group in Afghanistan". Mr Saqib said the court had not decided whether to allow independent monitoring of the trial. But he said the foreigners could hire lawyers if they wished.
The son of a jailed Islamist leader in the US said yesterday his family had proposed his release in exchange for the aid workers. The wife of Mr Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, who was jailed for the World Trade Center bombing, sent letters to the US president and the Taliban leadership to agree to such an exchange, he said.