A YOUNG cannabis gardener tied to a bed and tortured by a criminal gang raiding the crop from a house in Bradford has been jailed for six months.

Ardit Pali told staff at Bradford Royal Infirmary he had been robbed in the city centre when he turned up with severe stab and slash wounds to his legs after being bound with tape and flex and beaten at the property in Heaton Road.

The 24-year-old Albanian national had been brought to the United Kingdom by people traffickers and taken to the house from London to guard and tend the crop, his barrister Andrew Dallas said today.

Pali pleaded guilty to the production of cannabis on July 10.

When the police arrived at the cannabis grow after being alerted to the robbery by a member of the public, they found that 100 pots had been stripped out with just stumps left.

A follow-on crop was being grown in the attic, prosecutor Ian Howard said.

There was evidence of serious violence at the address, with widespread blood-staining, including on the windows and a single bed. Heavily bloodied electrical flex and black tape was also discovered.

The Recorder of Bradford, Judge Richard Mansell QC, said that Pali was clearly per-forming a very basic role in a house that was “grotty” compared to the conditions other cannabis gardeners worked in.

He was probably the victim of a rival drugs gang sending out a warning to the growers to get off their backs.

Pali did not have any keys to the address and the blood on the windows indicted his des-perate attempts to get out.

The robbers stole the crop and Pali’s phone, the only thing of value he had.

Judge Mansell said Pali wasn’t the victim of modern slavery but he was put in the house to tend the crop to pay off a debt incurred for his transportation to this country.

He had no previous convictions and he was promised decent work in the in the building trade here.

Judge Mansell warned that criminal gangs who found out where lucrative crops of skunk cannabis were being grown would often steal or rob the plants but extreme violence had been used in this case.

“It’s beyond me why they had to tie him up with flex and tape and torture him,” he said.

He told Pali: “They could have been a rival gang of dealers sending a clear message to whoever controlled the grow to get off their back and you were the innocent victim.”

The six-month sentence reflected Pali’s guilty plea and the violence and injury he had suffered.

He will be freed soon after spending ten weeks on remand but Judge Mansell said he didn’t know if he would then be taken to an immigration detention centre.