Thanks to Elena for forwarding me this news about Robert. This article describes briefly what the ‘ibra’ is, and it is an interesting concept.
As for Robert, the only thing I have to add is that I hope he survives imprisonment for the next 20 years in Pol-e-Charki prison. –Matt
Australian escapes death sentence after paying Afghan family
Ex-soldier has sentence commuted to 20 years in jail after paying relatives of murdered guard $100,000
By Jon Boone
Wednesday 5 January 2011
An Australian private security guard who murdered an Afghan worker has escaped the death sentence by paying the family of his victim $100,000 (£65,000), court documents reveal.
The former Australian soldier was handed the death sentence last January after a Kabul court found him guilty of shooting an Afghan colleague before making a crude attempt to make the crime look like a Taliban attack.
But it emerged this week that Robert William Langdon persuaded two supreme court judges that he should be allowed to live after the family of the dead man, who was known as Karimullah, accepted a large compensation payment raised by Langdon’s relatives in Australia.
However, the payment, known in sharia law as ibra, was not enough to commute the whole sentence, so Langdon will face 20 years in Kabul’s notorious Pol-e-Charki prison, home to Taliban and al-Qaida inmates as well as criminals. The jail term is thought to be the longest given to a westerner in Afghanistan since the toppling of the Taliban regime in 2001.
At the time of the killing in May 2009, Langdon was working for Four Horsemen International, a private firm which works with the US military and specialises in protecting military supply convoys.