Peshawar, Pakistan, June 5: Pakistani villagers shot dead a woman and three men in a public execution after a tribal council found them guilty of adultery, a witness and government officials said today.

Sex out of marriage is a crime in overwhelmingly Muslim Pakistan and punishable by stoning to death under Islamic laws, although that punishment has never officially been meted out.

But traditional village councils at times impose and carry out death sentences on their own.

About 600 people watched the four, including an Afghan refugee, shot to death in the Khyber agency, a semi-autonomous ethnic Pashtun tribal region on the Afghan border, yesterday.

''We found a man and a woman in a compromising position along with another man who was drunk and had already committed adultery, and the owner of the house'' said Haji Jan Gul, a resident of Alamgudar village, where the four were killed.

''All four confessed to adultery,'' he said.

A jirga, or traditional council of elders, ordered them killed after considering their case.

Pakistan's tribal areas are governed by their own laws and age-old customs still hold sway.

An official in the area's administration office confirmed the incident, saying the punishment was carried out in accordance with tribal traditions and authorities did not intervene.

In March, two men and a woman were stoned and then shot dead for adultery in the same region.

Hundreds of people are killed every year in Pakistan, most in remote backward areas, after being deemed to have dishonoured their families or violated tribal laws.

Reuters>