Accused drug lord in U.S. called Taliban backer

NEW YORK (Reuters) - An accused Afghan drug kingpin on trial in New York for conspiring to import more than $50 million worth of heroin was portrayed by prosecutors on Thursday as a warlord who helped the Taliban come to power.

But defense lawyers countered that Bashir Noorzai, 47, was an Afghan patriot who agreed to cooperate with the United States in the hopes of ensuring the country's stability only to be duped by U.S. authorities who arrested him.

"He brought (his) enormous power to the United States and said, 'It's yours,'" his lawyer Ivan Fisher told jurors in opening arguments at Manhattan federal court. "The government decided instead to arrest him and prosecute him."

Noorzai was arrested in April 2005 after U.S. President George W. Bush identified him as one of the world's most wanted drug traffickers.

Prosecutors allege Noorzai gave the Taliban explosives and weapons in return for protection of his opium crops.

They said Noorzai controlled fields where poppies were grown and harvested to make opium, and his organization used laboratories in Afghanistan and Pakistan to process the opium into heroin and arranged for it to be transported to the United States and Europe.

Fisher said Noorzai did not know he was being investigated when he flew to New York voluntarily in 2005 and submitted to questioning by agents over 11 days in a Manhattan hotel room.

During those meetings, Noorzai provided agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration and the FBI with critical information about Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar, Fisher said.

U.S.-led forces invaded Afghanistan and toppled the Taliban government shortly after the September 11 attacks in 2001 for failing to turn over al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Omar has been wanted by the United States.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Anirudh Bansal said Noorzai led an international trafficking organization since 1990 and was a leader of the million-member Noorzai tribe in the southern Afghan province of Kandahar, which became a Taliban stronghold. "In return, the Taliban made Bashir Noorzai a very powerful man in Afghanistan," Bansal said.

U.S. officials in Washington have linked Noorzai to bin Laden and al Qaeda, saying in return for helping finance the group it helped him move his drugs abroad.

Around 92 per cent of the world's heroin comes from poppies grown in Afghanistan, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.

(Editing by Daniel Trotta and Mohammad Zargham)