An Irish family fear their innocent father will die in a hellhole Iraqi prison if he is not freed soon.
Aussie-born engineer Robert Pether suffers from a number of medical conditions and is not receiving treatment.
He has been held for the last four years on trumped up fraud charges in Baghdad but the Iraq Central Bank is using his detention as leverage in a 20 million dollar contract row for a building that didn’t go ahead because of Covid supply issues.
Mr Pether and an Egyptian colleague had been employed by a Dubai based construction company, CME Consulting, to build a new Central Bank in Baghdad when the contract row erupted.
He was due to be released last January but now Iraq has issued new charges against them and he is facing a further 15 years in custody.
They are accused of stealing money from the project, which they both deny. The United Nations has slammed his jailing as “arbitrary detention.”
The businessman had been living with his wife Desree, sons Flynn, 21, Oscar, 19 and Nala, 12 – all Irish citizens in Elphin, Co Roscommon for the last decade. Now the heartbroken family may have to sell their home to pay for his €120,000 legal fees.
His devastated son Flynn told Shannonside Radio: “He was in court twice this week and there has never been any factual evidence presented against dad.
“It is shaping up to be a foregone conclusion when they are not even presented with the opportunity to defend themselves properly.
“He is not in good form, and is obviously very upset with this happening. It is hard to keep his hopes high, when you can’t get his case presented in a fair way when everything is unjust towards.
“His health is still declining. He is not able to receive proper, adequate specialist treatment that he needs and it remains a constant concern for all the parties, especially at home as well.
“Even if he does get out, what shape are we going to get him out in, and if he is positive for skin cancer or something like that and you can’t treat it, where do you go from there?
“Is it going to be a death sentence regardless, because we were not able to act on it in time, or because we were unable to get to him and his human rights were denied.
“The last we saw of him was in January, 2021. I am able to talk to him through phone calls, you are only seeing the voice not the face.
“He missed my Leaving Cert, my 18th birthday, my graduation for mechanical engineering, my 21st. I hope I will get to see him again at some point.
“It has been incredibly difficult for my mother and my siblings because you have that uncertainty over whether you will be able to see him again.”
Flynn revealed that his father’s employer stopped paying his salary eight months ago and his legal fees are now north of 120,000. They are considering selling their family home in Elphin and relocating to pay the lawyers in Iraq.
Flynn said the Irish Government has done everything to help but his father is not an Irish citizen. He would like to see the Iraqi Government held culpable for continually bringing innocent men like his father before court for something they didn’t do.
He said: “Many different international bodies have claimed that they are innocent, and yet the Iraqi government is still insisting these men are guilty for crimes they did not commit.
“They were just completely fabricated, fraudulent charges and yet they’ve continued to pursue it again and again,
“They are just bringing up the old charges with updated dates to just pursue them one more time so that it is an indefinite sentence, a death sentence through arbitration.”
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