A DICTATORIAL dad whose cruelty has been compared to “war crimes and torture” has failed to win a cut in his sentence.

The Bolton man, in his 40s, attacked his wife while she was pregnant, hung his daughter from a light fitting by her legs and thrashed his children with a roll of plastic wrap during 12 years of domestic abuse.

He admitted eight counts of cruelty to children and three of assault at Bolton Crown Court last summer and was jailed for five years and three months.

On Friday, judges at the Court of Appeal in London rejected a bid by him to have his sentence slashed, saying he was fortunate not to have received a harsher punishment. Mr Justice Globe said the authoritarian was arrested in late 2011 after his wife, having managed to expel him from their home, reported his abuse of her and his children between 1999 and 2011 to police. The appeal judge said the dad first launched into an attack on his pregnant wife in front of their young children more than 10 years ago, adding: “He pushed her on to the settee and knelt on her stomach while continuing to assault her.”

On another occasion, he resorted to drastic corporal punishment when salt was spilled on the dinner table and neither of his daughters, then aged four and eight, owned up.

He tied the pair up by their ankles and beat them with a roll of plastic wrap, and when their mother tried to intervene he pulled her hair, ripped off her dress, leaving her naked and humiliated in front of her children, and then beat her.

The tyrant also hung his four-year-old daughter by her feet from a light fitting.

And in 2010, he slapped his eight-year-old son, tied his feet and locked him outside because he had stopped reading the Quran with his sisters and began playing.

The boy was so frightened that he wet himself.

When his older daughter was 16, he slapped her, threatened her and made her swear she was single, the court heard.

Farrhat Ashad, representing the man, said the sentencing judge overrated the seriousness of the cruelty offences after comparing them to a “war crime or torture”, and failed to take into account that he loved his family and had not inflicted punishments out of sadism.

But Mr Justice Globe, sitting with Judge Stephen Kramer QC, rejected the appeal.