A British court on Monday convicted a former Afghan warlord of torture for terrorising innocent civilians in his homeland for 4 years in what prosecutors said was the first case of its kind in the world. A private army loyal to Farayadi Sarwar Zardad, 42, including a "human dog" that ate a victim's testicles, brutalised Afghans in the Sarobi district east of Kabul which he commanded in the 1990s before he was ousted by the Taleban.
Zardad, who was found guilty at London's Old Bailey criminal court of conspiracy to torture people and take hostages, will be sentenced on Tuesday.
The unprecedented case - Zardad's second trial after a jury failed to reach a verdict last year - was the first in Britain to involve human rights violations committed abroad and to have witnesses give evidence anonymously via a satellite link.
The court heard how Zardad's men and the commander himself committed atrocities between 1991 and 1996 when he commanded an 80-km (50-mile) area of territory which included a key highway from Pakistan to the Afghan capital.
He moved to Britain in 1998 seeking asylum and was running a pizza parlour in south London when he was arrested in 2002 by anti-terrorism police after the case was brought to light by a BBC journalist.
Afghan witnesses, who said they received death threats for agreeing to give evidence in Kabul where Zardad's name is still feared, recounted how his men had robbed, beaten, raped, and murdered travellers at checkpoints and a nearby prison.
One man was beaten so severely during a four-month incarceration that his family did not recognise him, while another told how as a 7-year-old boy he had seen his father's ear being cut off.
The most striking evidence concerned Zardad's "human dog", said to be Abdullah Shah executed in April on the orders of Afghan President Hamid Karzai for murdering dozens of people.
Shah, whose reputation helped cement Zardad's position, was kept chained in a hole and would be set upon civilians, biting them and eating testicles under the orders of the warlord's men, the court heard.
British police who met Shah described him as being like "Hagrid from Harry Potter, but much scarier".
The verdict will be a boon to human rights campaigners who have long called for countries to prosecute war criminals for actions carried out anywhere in the world.
"We believe this is the first time in any country, in international law, and certainly in English law, where offences of torture and hostage taking have been prosecuted in circumstances such as this," prosecutor James Lewis said.
In his homeland, Zardad had belonged to the conservative Islamic party Hizb-i-Islami, led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a mujahideen leader who became prime minister of Afghanistan during the civil war in the early 1990s.
Hekmatyar is now a fugitive allied to the Taleban who were ousted by US forces in late 2001, and his fighters are involved in an insurgency in the south-east of Afghanistan.
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