A former Taliban torturer has won the right to stay in the UK over fears he would be tortured himself if he was sent back to Afghanistan.
The Home Office accepted that deporting him to his home country would place him at ‘real risk’ of torture and could breach his human rights.
The ex-intelligence commander had been recruited to the Taliban as a child soldier in the 1990s, reports the Sun.
The unnamed man, who says he is 42, ordered waterboarding, sleep deprivation and whipping to extract information from prisoners while in charge of 300 men.
He climbed the ranks after volunteering for the front lines of the brutal Battle of Kabul in 1995, during Afghanistan’s civil war.
He first came to Britain in 2006 and tried to claim asylum, but was rejected and deported within months.
The unnamed former Taliban torturer (pictured), who says he is 42, ordered waterboarding, sleep deprivation and whipping to extract information from prisoners while in charge of 300 men
The ex-intelligence commander had been recruited to the group as a child soldier in the 1990s (Pictured: A Taliban fighter stands guard at the venue for a flag hoisting ceremony of the Taliban flag on the Wazir Akbar Khan hill in Kabul on March 31, 2022)
He lodged another claim in 2010, but this too was rejected.
But in his latest appeal, he told the British government how he had been captured and tortured by a rival group to the Taliban, called the Northern Alliance.
He claimed the ordeal left him with ‘complex mental health problems.’
The Home Office decided to grant him limited leave to remain under the European Convention on Human Rights.
It said there is currently ‘no question’ of him returning.
MailOnline has contacted the Home Office for comment.
It comes after the UK agreed to take in up to 20,000 Afghan refugees since it fell to the Taliban last year.
According to figures from the UNHCR, as of mid-2021 there were 135,912 refugees in Britain, plus 83,489 pending asylum cases and 3,968 stateless persons.
The West’s rapid withdrawal from Afghanistan was widely criticised for failing to prepare the country for the subsequent Taliban take over.
The head of MI5 warned in February that the country is again becoming a breeding ground for terror, with British extremists already trying to travel there.
Ken McCallum said he was concerned about ‘terrorist infrastructure and networks reconstituting’ in the troubled country just months after the West’s catastrophic withdrawal.
In September, he warned that MI5 was braced for an ‘increase in inspired terrorism’ and the ‘potential regrowth of Al Qaeda-style directed plots’ as the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan had ‘heartened and emboldened’ extremists.
The director general of the domestic spy agency revealed that it had detected the ‘beginnings of some travel attempts’ by aspiring jihadis in the UK.
In an interview with the Daily Mail, Mr McCallum warned that terror groups may be able to reform in Afghanistan and plan sophisticated operations targeting Britain.
In an interview with the Daily Mail, Ken McCallum (pictured) warned that terror groups may be able to reform in Afghanistan and plan sophisticated operations targeting the UK
He said that in September, he had ‘flagged two risks’, one of which was the ‘immediate morale boost that Afghanistan would give to extremists here’.
The second was ‘the slower burn risk of terrorist groups reconstituting themselves within Afghanistan and projecting the threat back at the West including the UK’.
Mr McCallum continued: ‘We have seen versions of both of those risks beginning to materialise.’
He suggested that the region could become a magnet for British extremists in a similar way to Syria, where hundreds flocked to join the Islamic State terror group.
The spy chief said: ‘Clearly we have seen some people interested in travelling to Afghanistan in pursuit of some of those goals.
‘We have seen the beginnings of some travel attempts and so with our partners we remain very vigilant.’
Until the West’s chaotic abandonment of Afghanistan last August, efforts to combat the terrorist threat there had been largely successful over the last decade.
The spy chief said: ‘Clearly we have seen some people interested in travelling to Afghanistan in pursuit of some of those goals.’
But Mr McCallum said there is a risk of the return of sophisticated large-scale plots intended to cause mass casualties, such as the thwarted 2006 plan to detonate liquid explosives on seven transatlantic aircraft taking off from Heathrow.
He revealed that MI5 is facing tough decisions because the threat from hostile states such as Russia and China now rivals terrorism, and said outdated laws made it impossible to prosecute foreign spies in this country.
In a wide-ranging interview, Mr McCallum also spoke about the enduring threat of a biological attack on Britain.
He said: ‘Al Qaeda, for example, determinedly engaged in research and development. This is never something which has gone away as a risk.’
Mr McCallum added that the global impact of the Covid pandemic may also have inspired potential terrorists.
‘It will have occurred to many people that biological or viral or their agents can be tools of significant game-changing events,’ he said.
‘It does not automatically follow that anyone having that thought has the wherewithal to do something intelligent about it.
‘But this has always been one of the risks that we are mindful of and seek to manage.’
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