"Please don't ask more questions about women," Bashir Ahmad Rustamzai told AFP, from an armchair where Afghanistan's Olympic Committee president had sat until he fled the country last month.

Rustamzai, a heavily-built former kung fu and wrestling champion with a bushy black and white beard, was appointed by the hardline Islamist group to be Afghanistan's director general for sports and physical education.

Once the wrestling federation chief when the Taliban were last in power, Rustamzai then worked with the Western-backed government, before falling out with them because of "their widespread corruption," he said.

'We will not ban any sport'

Dressed in a black turban typical of the Taliban, Rustamzai repeatedly ducked questions on the issue of women's sports.

During the extremists' brutal and oppressive regime from 1996 to 2001, women were completely banned from playing any sport while men's sport was tightly controlled. Women were also largely banned from education and work.

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