LONDON, July 19: Afghan warlord Faryadi Sarwar Zardad was sentenced to 20 years in prison by a London court on Tuesday for torture and hostage-taking in Afghanistan in a landmark case for international law.

Mr Zardad, 42, who lived in south London, had denied the charges, which included keeping a ‘human dog’ to savage his victims.

The ruling came as Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai met Prime Minister Tony Blair during a brief trip to London.

In the first trial of its kind under a UN torture convention, Mr Zardad, who fled to Britain in 1998 on a fake passport, was prosecuted at the Old Bailey even though he is not a British citizen and his crimes were committed overseas.

The gravity of Mr Zardad’s crimes ‘is demonstrated by the fact that most unusually a person who has committed them in another country can be tried and punished for them by the courts of this country’, said judge Colman Treacy.—AFP