UK – The Daily Mail, February 16, 2025
A Sydney father claims he is being subjected to brutal bouts of torture while behind bars in a fetid Iraqi prison and fears he will die before seeing his heartbroken family again.
Robert Pether has been locked up in a heavily-guarded facility on the outskirts of Baghdad for the better part of half a decade after being arrested while helping the war-ravaged country rebuild four years ago.
The mechanical engineer – who has lost a third of his body weight since being thrown in prison – claims he is being unlawfully held captive as part of a sinister plot to extort millions of dollars from his boss’s construction company.
He was arrested, along with his colleague Khalid Zaghoul Radwan, after travelling to the Middle Eastern country’s capital city to discuss a multimillion-dollar blowout in the cost of building the new headquarters for the government-owned Central Bank of Iraq on April 7, 2021.
The duo were sentenced to five years in prison – and fined more than $16million – on what he says were ‘fabricated’ fraud charges.
The pair were expected to be released last month, until Iraqi officials suddenly revealed they planned to charge him with further money laundering offences.
