TASHKENT, Sept 23: A former Soviet soldier once thought to have been killed in action in Afghanistan appeared in an Uzbek court on Thursday after being extradited from Pakistan.

Kosimdjon Ermatov, 38, faces eight charges including terrorism, threatening Uzbekistan's constitution, mercenary activity and provoking ethnic and religious discord, said a member of the Independent Human Rights Defenders of Uzbekistan, which has followed the case.

At the court session on Thursday, Mr Ermatov stood calmly in the cage reserved for defendants and acknowledged that he had been in contact with Uzbek rebel Tokhir Yuldashev, blamed for a series of incursions from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan into Uzbekistan between 1999 and 2001.

"If his orders accorded with Shariat then they were accepted - if not they were not," Mr Ermatov told the court. Earlier his parents said they were astonished by their son's return to Uzbekistan from Karachi, where he allegedly headed a cell of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU).

In 1986 the family had received from Uzbekistan's Soviet authorities a death certificate and a metal coffin, which they did not open but were told contained their son's body, his 75-year-old mother, Kumrikhon Temirova, said.

Mr Ermatov was posthumously awarded a Red Star military honour, a street and a school were renamed after him and a statue of him put up in his home town of Pap, eastern Uzbekistan. But in 1991 the family heard from a Czech journalist that their son was alive in Afghanistan, the statue was torn down and he is subsequently alleged to have joined the IMU. "I've seen my son alive and behind bars for the first time in 21 years," Temirova said outside the court. -AFP