Fresh Doubt Cast on Conviction of Foreign Businessmen in Iraq
By John Lee.
The Guardian has claimed that a new cache of documents undermines key evidence used to jail a pair of foreign businessmen in Baghdad.
Australian engineer Robert Pether and his Egyptian colleague Khalid Radwan have been detained since April 2021. They have been sentenced to five years in prison and jointly fined $12 million on charges of fraud.
Their families claim they were tricked into traveling to Iraq to attempt to resolve the dispute relating to the construction of the new Central Bank of Iraq (CBI) head office in Baghdad.
The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found that Australian engineer Robert Pether and Egyptian engineer Khalid Radwan were "arbitrarily detained on discriminatory grounds", and referred the case to the Special Rapporteur on torture.
More here.
(Source: The Guardian)
