KABUL, August 16 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – Three Americans went on trial Monday, August 16, for kidnapping and torturing detainees in Afghanistan, with one of them accusing Washington of direct involvement in the scandal.

The three Americans and four of their Afghan helpers appeared before an Afghani court, including the alleged ringleader of the group, Jonathan Keith Idema, 48, of Fayetteville, N.C., a former Special Forces soldier who spent time in federal prison in the 1990s on fraud charges.

The seven men, detained on July 5 from a house in west Kabul where they were said to be running a private counter-terrorism operation, apparently hoping to score the millions of dollars on offer from the FBI and CIA for the capture of top Al-Qaeda figures including Osama bin Laden.

Bin Laden has a 25 million dollar bounty on his head.

Idema emerged in northern Afghanistan in 2001 as a self-described security consultant, supposedly assisting the Northern Alliance, the US-supported Afghan group that was cracking down on the Taliban regime.

He told the court FBI agents had seized evidence proving his links to US authorities.

The FBI had taken from the Afghan National Directorate of Security (NDS) hundreds of videotapes, photos and documents detailing links with the FBI, the CIA, the US Defense Department and the US-led forces, Idema said.

"In front of the judge is the receipt that the FBI signed. Why did the judge allow the FBI to take evidence from the NDS?" he wondered, saying 500 pages of documents, 200 videotapes and at least 400 photos detailing had been seized, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).

"Now it's at the US embassy where none is ever going to see it."

Idema said that he and his partners, who called their operation "Task Force Sabre 7", were working with the full knowledge of US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Both the US and Afghan governments have disavowed any ties with Idema, Bennett and Caraballo.

But since Idema's first court appearance on July 21, US-led forces have admitted they took a terror suspect arrested by Idema into custody.

The man was later released after US forces found he was not a wanted militant.

US-led forces and peacekeepers said they were duped into helping Idema's team, who wore US-style uniforms, believing they were legitimate special forces operatives.

The seven men face jail sentences of between 16 and 20 years if found guilty.

The charges come at a sensitive time when the American government is facing criticism for apparent mistreatment and torture of Iraqi detainees, with investigations into similar charges underway in Afghanistan.

Idema had already said that those Afghani captives found in his private prison were terrorists, but Afghan prosecutors say they were innocent and ordinary Afghans including a judge, a shopkeeper and a taxi driver.

Mohammed Sadiq, a religious scholar and Supreme Court judge who was held by the three Americans, recounted 12 days and 11 nights of torture.

Sadiq said he was kept naked and blindfolded in a small hut, forced to urinate and defecate where he sat, Washington Post reported Monday.

He said his captors doused him with cold water and played deafeningly loud music next to him.

Around him, he added, he could hear the screams of other people being tortured.

When he was freed on the 12th day of his ordeal, following a shootout that he heard but could not see, Sadiq said, he was told by an Afghan intelligence officer that he had not been arrested, but kidnapped, and that the three American civilians were running a private makeshift jail in a rented house to try to extract confessions.

The New York Times carried a testimony of a former Afghan police colonel accusing the US forces of torturing and sexually abusing him while in several US-run detention centers across Afghanistan.