Islamic snuff films are big sellers in Pakistan, and the radical Islamic propaganda factories are churning them out as fast as they can: Pakistani jihadi videos thrive on execution scenes.

ISLAMABAD, April 30 (Reuters) - The movie salesman was selling jihad to the converted.

The buyers thronging his stall on the sidelines of a late-night rally in the Pakistani capital belonged to a crowd organised by a sectarian Sunni Muslim group.

“This is the latest video of the beheadings,” he told his customers, as they pored over titles including “Slaughter of Americans in Iraq”, “Slaughter of Traitors in Afghanistan” and “Taliban Celebrations”. …

The video seller didn’t have the latest action from the conflict on the Afghan border, but he had something just as gruesome. “This one is about the activities of mujahideen in Waziristan and Afghanistan,” the seller said.

Dated in December, and supposedly shot in Miranshah, the main town in North Waziristan, it had footage of hangings ordered by influential militant clerics.

The bodies of the hanged men, described as criminals and bandits, were then dragged through the streets by pick-up trucks, in a grisly demonstration of rough justice in an area where the civil administration has, according to tribesmen, collapsed.

“The commentary in them makes no bones about who is producing them — they are Pakistani Talibs,” said Samina Ahmed, the Islamabad-based director of the International Crisis Group’s South Asia project.

For less than a dollar apiece, some VCDs glorify the exploits of al Qaeda and Taliban fighters, promise 72 heavenly virgins for prospective suicide bombers and prescribe beheadings for informers. There are also training films on how to run a guerrilla war, based on Islamist militants fighting the Russian army in Chechnya.

Messages in the films put Presidents George W. Bush, Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan and Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan at the top of a hit list for would-be assassins in a war against what are described as the American “crusader forces”.