Abdullah Shah was born in 1965. He fought in the anti-communist mujahideen resistance until the fall of the Najibullah government in 1992, and in the civil war that followed he commanded a small armed band in the Paghman district west of Kabul. The accounts of whose command he was under do not agree. Most place him as an enforcer for Faryadi Sarwar Zardad, whose men held the checkpoint at Sarobi on the road between Kabul and Jalalabad, and place Zardad in Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hezb-e Islami. Shah himself told an American reporter in November 2002 that he had for a time been under the command of Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, whose forces held Paghman. Both can be true of different years, and this entry does not choose between them.
What the checkpoint was for is not in dispute. Travellers were stopped, robbed of money, goods and vehicles, and those who resisted or had nothing to give were beaten or killed. Bodies were put down wells. A well in Paghman holding a number of decomposed bodies was among the evidence at his trial, and it is the single physical fact the case rests on.
The name he is known by, Zardad's Dog, is not a general remark about brutality. It comes from a specific allegation given in evidence at Zardad's trial in London: that Zardad kept a man chained in a cave and brought him out to savage captured travellers with his teeth, biting them, in one account about the genitals, to make them hand over what they had. Witnesses named that man as Abdullah Shah. It should be read for what it is, the testimony of witnesses in a British courtroom about a man who by then had been dead two years, who was never charged with any of it and never answered it. It is also the reason the nickname is attached to him in every reference work that carries his name.
The murders he was actually convicted of include his own household. Afghan officials said he was found guilty of killing one of his wives by pouring boiling water over her, and that the court heard he had killed his baby daughter by beating her repeatedly against a wall. Another wife, who said he had doused her with petrol and tried to burn her to death, was one of nine witnesses who testified against him. A gallery note published in London in 2005 says he is said to have killed three of his wives and five of his children; that figure appears nowhere in the official accounts of the case and is not adopted here.
He was charged with twenty counts of murder and sentenced to death by a special court in October 2002, after what one account describes as three sets of proceedings. The trial is why the case matters. He had no defence lawyer. The proceedings were closed. His confession was alleged to have been obtained under torture. The first judge was dismissed for taking a bribe, reportedly from Shah's relatives, and the judge who replaced him was reported to be under pressure from the Supreme Court to pass the death sentence. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions observed the proceedings, and Amnesty International formally protested to President Karzai in September 2003 and asked for an assurance that he would not be executed after a trial of that kind. A commissioner of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, Ahmad Nader Nadery, said afterwards that the charges should have been war crimes and crimes against humanity, which the Afghan courts of the day had no means of trying.
Karzai signed the death warrant. Shah was shot once in the back of the head at Pul-e-Charkhi prison outside Kabul, with representatives of the police, the Attorney General's office and doctors present. It was the first judicial execution in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban in late 2001. Afghan officials gave the date as April 20, 2004; Amnesty International put it at approximately 19 April; and the government did not confirm it publicly until about a week afterwards, which the BBC correspondent in Kabul read as a measure of how sensitive the case had become. A presidential spokesman, Jawed Ludin, said the case had been waiting more than a year, that international organisations had had access to Shah throughout, and that the sentence had to be carried out so that the surviving victims could get on with their lives.
Amnesty's objection went further than the trial. It said the execution might have been an attempt by powerful political players to eliminate a key witness to human rights abuses, because in detention Shah had given first-hand evidence against several regional commanders then holding office against whom no charges had been brought, and national elections were due that September. Afghanistan carried out no further judicial execution until 2007.
Zardad's own case ran the other way. He had reached Britain on a false passport in 1998, claimed asylum, and was running a pizza business in south London when a BBC Newsnight programme identified him in July 2000. He was arrested in 2003 and tried at the Old Bailey under the United Nations Convention against Torture, which obliged Britain to prosecute a suspected torturer who had come within its jurisdiction whatever his nationality and wherever the acts were committed, with the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, leading for the Crown. The first jury could not agree. At a retrial he was convicted on July 18, 2005 of conspiracy to torture and conspiracy to take hostages and sentenced to twenty years. He was released after about eleven and deported to Kabul in December 2016, where supporters put up banners at the airport welcoming him home as a hero. The subordinate was shot in a Kabul jail on evidence no court outside Afghanistan ever tested; the commander was convicted in London in a landmark case and came home.
One further record exists. The artists Langlands and Bell filmed the October 2002 hearing in Kabul, and the short film they edited from that footage, Zardad's Dog, formed part of their Turner Prize nomination. It was withdrawn from the exhibition at Tate Britain in October 2004 on advice that showing it while Zardad was on trial in London could be a contempt of court, and was not shown publicly until October 3, 2005. It is, as far as can be established, the only moving picture of the proceedings that condemned him.