UK faces £300k Afghan torture claim

http://edition.presstv.ir/TextOnly/detail.aspx?id=266604 UK faces £300k Afghan torture claim Sun, 14 Oct 2012 11:22:06 GMT An Afghan farmer has sued the British Ministry of Defense (MoD) accusing British soldiers of beating and torture to force him to confess to a crime he did not commit. According to Sardar Mohammed’s lawsuit at the High Court, soldiers arrested him while he was irrigating his crops in the Afghan Province of Helmand in April 2010, transferred him to a location where rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and an RPG launcher were stored and demanded that he explains about the weapons he did not own. The father-of-two was later beaten and placed in custody before he was transferred to another detention center in Helmand later in July where he was subjected to beating and physical abuse. He was then taken to a detention facility in Kabul and tortured to the point he was forced to sign a confession that he was a Taliban member. Mohammed was kept imprisoned for another seven months and was later found guilty in a court without a lawyer and was given 16 years in jail, which he appealed an reduced to ten years. Mohammed is now asking the MoD for a £300,000 compensation in a potentially explosive case that could open the ministry to thousands of abuse and torture claims by other Afghan civilians. His lawyer Rosa Curling is now pledging to teach the British government a lesson. “The abuse our client has suffered must not be allowed to happen to anyone else,” Curling said.