The video showed group leader Jonathan Idema meeting presidential candidate and former education minister Yunus Qanooni and discussing the future arrest of an education ministry employee suspected of trying to assassinate Qanooni.

Idema, who is on trial with fellow US citizens Brent Bennett and Edward Caraballo, claims the group was working with the full knowledge of US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld to hunt down terrorist suspects.

The trio were arrested in July for allegedly running a private prison and counter-terrorism operation in Kabul. They could face up to 20 years in jail if found guilty.

However, chief prosecutor Muhammad Nahim Daiwari dismissed the video conversation as “personal, unofficial, and illegal.”

Caraballo’s lawyer Michael Skibbie also presented a video showing bomb-disposal experts from NATO-led multinational peacekeepers searching a Kabul house, which Idema’s team had identified as belonging to terror suspects, and finding explosives hidden in pillows and in the garden.

Since Idema was arrested the International Security Assistance Force admitted helping his group with ordnance disposal on three occasions, but said it was misled into believing Idema and his colleagues were US special forces.

Idema said NATO knew exactly who he was.

“Do you think they would send 50 soldiers without knowing who I was? We had conversations with them where we exactly explained who we were,” he said.

Judge Abdul Basaet Bakhtiari ordered a week’s adjournment to allow time for Bennett’s lawyer to arrive in Afghanistan and prepare a defense.

Bakhtiari has publicly expressed his own doubts about Idema’s honesty.

“I think Jack is a brave man but he found Afghanistan a good place for fraud and irresponsible activities,” AFP quoted Bakhtiari as saying.

Idema has been in Afghanistan since late 2001. By his own account, since the 9/11 attacks Idema has spent “every dime I could raise, earn, or borrow,” on combating Al Qaeda, he said in a rambling 11-page statement written from jail last week.

But he denies allegations that he was a bounty hunter after the $25 million reward on Osama Bin Laden’s head, saying instead that he fought “for God and country.”

His credibility, however, has been undermined by US news reports that the former US soldier from Fayetteville in North Carolina, was jailed in 1994 on fraud charges and spent over three years in jail.

The case has illuminated the shadowy world of private security contractors in Afghanistan and strengthened calls by rights groups for the US-led military to open its detention centers to independent inspection.AFP