Updated at 10:55 a.m. ET: PESHAWAR, Pakistan -- A Pakistani doctor accused of helping the CIA find Osama bin Laden was convicted of high treason and sentenced to 33 years in prison on Wednesday. 

Geo News via Reuters TV

Shakil Afridi is seen in an undated image.

Shakil Afridi ran a vaccination program for the American intelligence agency to collect DNA and verify bin Laden's presence at the compound in the town of Abbottabad, where he was killed last May by U.S. commandos.

A U.S. official implicitly criticized the sentence. "Without commenting on specific individuals, anyone who helped the United States find bin Laden was working against al-Qaida and not against Pakistan," Pentagon spokesman George Little said. 

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has previously called for Afridi to be released, saying his work served Pakistani and American interests.

Afridi was also ordered to pay a fine of about $3,500, Nasir Khan, a government official in the Khyber tribal area, told The Associated Press. If he doesn't pay, he will spend another three and half years in prison, Khan said. 

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His imprisonment is likely to anger ally Washington at a sensitive time, with both sides engaged in difficult talks over re-opening NATO supply routes to U.S.-led troops in Afghanistan. 

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U.S. officials had hoped Pakistan, a recipient of billions of dollars in American aid, would release Afridi. He was detained after the unilateral operation which killed bin Laden and strained ties with Islamabad. 

Slideshow: After the raid: Inside bin Laden's compound

Farooq Naeem / AFP - Getty Images

U.S. forces found and killed the al-Qaida leader in the affluent Pakistani town of Abbottabad, where he had been living in a large compound.

Launch slideshow

Report: CIA ran vaccine ruse to get bin Laden's DNA

In January, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said in a television interview that Afridi and his team had been key in finding bin Laden, describing him as helpful and insisting the doctor had not committed treason or harmed Pakistan.

U.S. Congressman Dana Rohrabacher introduced legislation in February calling for Afridi to be granted American citizenship and said it was "shameful and unforgivable that our supposed allies" charged him. 

Afridi was arrested soon after bin Laden was killed, and has not been publicly heard of since. Seventeen health workers who worked with him on the vaccination drive were fired in March, according to termination letters seen by Reuters, which described them as having acted "against the national interest." 

Slideshow: Osama bin Laden is Dead

Brian Fairrington / Politicalcartoons.com

After years of hunting him down, Osama bin Laden is finally dead.  Check out this cartoon slideshow.

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On May 2, one year after bin Laden's death, some of them appeared at the site where bin Laden's run-down white cement and brick house stood before it was demolished by Pakistani authorities. 

"He (Afridi) was very nice to all the people in the team and did his job very diligently," Naseem Bibi, one of the health workers told Reuters, holding one of the notices. "Yes he was very interested in this house on that day (of the vaccination drive) but I am not sure why." 

NBC News' Mushtaq Yusufzai, Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Updated at 10:50 a.m. ET: Syrian doctors tortured patients brought into a military hospital in the battered city of Homs, according to a hospital employee who filmed the apparent evidence. The video was broadcast by Britain's Channel 4 News Monday.

Later on Tuesday, the United Nations said it had similar footage.

The very graphic video, which the news channel said was filmed covertly, showed severely wounded men blindfolded and chained to hospital beds. A rubber whip and an electrical cable sit on a table in one room.

"I have seen detainees being tortured by electrocution, whipping, beating with batons, and by breaking their legs," the employee told a French photojournalist who reportedly smuggled the video outside of Syria, according to Channel 4.

The authenticity of the film could not be independently verified. 

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The hospital employee said he tried to stop "the shameful things" that were happening but was called a traitor. 

He said the torture was carried out by civilian and military surgeons and other medical staff including nurses. It reportedly took place in the ambulance section, the prison ward, the X-ray department and the intensive care unit. The footage was filmed over the past three months, Channel 4 said.

U.S. and European governments have been pleading for Russia to rethink his anti-interventionist stance on Syria, in what appeared to be an increasingly desperate effort for consensus among world powers to stop a crackdown that has killed more than 7,500 people.

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Hussein Malla / AP

Hundreds of Syrians, like this child and her family, have fled besieged areas in and around Homs for Lebanon or the Lebanon-Syria border.

Hundreds fled to neighboring Lebanon on Monday fearing they'd be massacred in their homes.

Calls for action to protect civilians have grown louder as the Alawite-led security apparatus cracked down on protests and an uprising that has its roots in the majority Sunni community and which has raised the prospect of civil war in Syria.

'Pictures are truly shocking'
A U.N. commission of inquiry last November documented cases of injured people taken to military hospitals where they were beaten and tortured during interrogation.

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"The High Commissioner was sent this footage by Channel 4 yesterday. In fact we have some similar footage," U.N. human rights spokesman Rupert Colville said on Tuesday.

"It may even be the same footage which was sent to the commission of inquiry on Syria," Colville, a spokesman for U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, said at a news briefing. "The pictures are truly shocking."

A U.N. inquiry documented evidence that sections of Homs military hospital and Latakia state hospital were "transformed into torture centers actually within the hospitals," he said.

Syrian activist: 'You hear the sounds of torture all the time'

Torture has been documented in Syria for 40 years, "usually carried out under the cloak of permanent security legislation," Colville said, adding: "The brutality of the country's security forces is notorious."

"Methods of torture, most of which are known to have been used in Syria over many years, not just in the past year, include severe beatings, electric shocks, suspension for long periods by the limbs, psychological torture and routine humiliation," he added.

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Msnbc.com staff and Reuters contributed to this report.

Updated at 8 a.m ET: JOHANNESBURG -- Former President Nelson Mandela was released from the hospital Sunday after an overnight stay for minor diagnostic surgery to determine the cause of an abdominal complaint, a spokesman for the country's current leader said.

Spokesman Mac Maharaj said the 93-year-old Nobel peace laureate and anti-apartheid leader had undergone a laparoscopy, a procedure that involves surgeons making an incision in the belly to insert a thin, lighted tube to look at abdominal organs.

"The doctors have decided to send him home as the diagnostic procedure he underwent did not indicate anything seriously wrong
with him," President Jacob Zuma's office added in a statement.

Earlier in the day, Zuma had released a statement saying that Mandela was "surrounded by his family and is relaxed and
comfortable."

"The doctors are happy with the progress he is making. We thank all South Africans for their love and support of Madiba. We also thank all for affording Madiba and his family privacy and dignity," said Zuma, referring to Mandela by his clan name.

In the latest health update, Defense Minister Lindiwe Sisulu said Mandela had had "investigative laparoscopy" -- where a tiny camera is inserted into the abdomen -- and denied reports that he had undergone surgery for a hernia.

"It wasn't the surgery that has been out there in the media at all," Sisulu told a media briefing in Cape Town. "He's fine. He's as fine as can be at his age -- and handsome."

The government has not revealed where Mandela is being treated, although reporters were being kept at a distance from Pretoria's "1 Military" hospital, which is officially responsible for the health of sitting and former presidents.

South Africa's former President Nelson Mandela hospitalized

Mandela, a Nobel peace laureate who spent 27 years in prison for fighting racist white rule, has officially retired and last appeared in public in July 2010. He became South Africa's first black president in 1994 and served one five-year term.

On Sunday, well-wishers prayed for Mandela at Regina Mundi church in Soweto, a former center of anti-apartheid protests and funerals.

In 1997, Mandela spoke at the church, calling it a "battlefield between forces of democracy and those who did not hesitate to violate a place of religion with tear gas, dogs and guns."

But despite widespread public affection, most accept that Mandela may not live for much longer.

"We wish him well," said Soweto resident Ronny Zondi. "But understanding his age, we've got to accept he might not be with us for long. We wish that God could keep him longer."

Mandela's last public appearance was in July 2010 at the final of the World Cup in Johannesburg's Soccer City stadium. He now divides his time between his home in Johannesburg's northern suburbs and his ancestral village of Qunu in the Eastern Cape.

The government's public comments on Mandela's hospitalization have been markedly more open than a year ago.

Then, Zuma's office took hours to confirm media reports of a sudden decline in Mandela's health, leading to a scrum of local and international reporters outside Johannesburg's Milpark hospital.

Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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