Uber driver accused of being a Somali war criminal

  “Two men were caught, tied to a tree. Oil was poured on them and they were burnt alive." Eye witness

- He’s an alleged Somali war criminal accused of burning men alive and shooting a captor five times at point-blank range — and, until recently, he was driving for Uber.

Yusuf Abdi Ali, a military commander in Somalia’s brutal civil war during the 1980s, has racked up a stellar 4.89 “Uber Pro Diamond” rating while driving through the Virginia suburbs over the past 18 months, CNN reported on Wednesday.

“I do this full-time,” Ali told an undercover reporter from the network, before bragging about how easy it was to get the gig. “They just want your background check, that’s it.

“If you apply tonight, maybe after two days it will come.”

Ali, who also formerly drove for Lyft, apparently slipped through cracks in the ride-share giants’ screening system because he has never been convicted of a crime — but a cursory online search of his name would have revealed abundant information on his alleged dark past.

“He caught my brother. He tied him to a military vehicle and dragged him behind,” one witness to Ali’s alleged atrocities in Somalia said in a 1992 documentary produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. “He shredded him into pieces.”

Another witness said, “Two men were caught, tied to a tree. Oil was poured on them and they were burnt alive. I saw it with my own eyes.”

Ali — also known as Colonel Tukeh, or “the crow” — is additionally now the defendant in a federal lawsuit filed in Virginia by one of his alleged surviving victims.

Farhan Warfaa claims in that filing that Ali and his men, armed with AK-47s, abducted him and others from their village in the dead of night in 1987 on suspicion of helping Somali rebels steal a water tanker.

Warfaa said he and his group were held in a windowless cell and tortured for months.

One night in 1988, Ali was again interrogating Warfaa when rebels raided the base, the suit claims.

Ali purportedly took out his pistol, shot Warfaa five times and, believing he was dead, ordered his bodyguards to bury him, court filings say. Only Warfaa survived, and his family bribed Ali’s henchmen to let him go, according to the suit.

Ali has consistently denied the heinous allegations against him — including in 2016, when CNN first found him working security at Dulles International Airport outside Washington, DC.

Ali, who is in the United States legally on a visa through his Somali wife’s citizenship, cleared an FBI background check and a Transportation Security Administration assessment to get the Dulles job but was sidelined in the wake of the CNN report.

Now, Lyft, for which Ali hadn’t driven since September, has permanently banned him, while Uber has taken him off the road pending a review.

“All drivers must undergo a driving and criminal-history background check reviewing local, state and national records,” an Uber spokeswoman said. “We evaluate eligibility in accordance with criteria set by local laws.”

New York Post/ Lia Eustachewich