The Swedish Foreign Ministry confirms to SVT on Friday that the man has been sentenced to death in Iraq.
The 35-year-old man was sentenced to death in Iraq in June for drug offences. According to the verdict, which SVT has seen, he was found together with two other men in an apartment in Baghdad with just over 300 grams of cannabis.
The man traveled to Iraq on holiday last December. Shortly afterwards, the man’s family in Sweden lost all contact with him, and then traveled to the country to search for him.
– Suddenly he was just gone. We called hospitals and authorities but everyone said they didn’t know anything.
Finally, they received a call from a person who had visited relatives in prison and was contacted by the 35-year-old, who asked the person to contact the family and tell them that he was incarcerated.
The man, who is a native of Western Sweden and has dual citizenship, Swedish and Iraqi, has previously been convicted of minor crimes in Sweden.
The man’s lawyer: Subjected to torture
According to the 35-year-old’s lawyer Wissam Al Jiburi, all three convicts have been subjected to both physical and psychological torture.
The lawyer tells SVT that he only got to meet his client half an hour before the trial started. According to him, the trial lasted only a quarter of an hour, and the family was not allowed to attend.
The punishment for drug crimes is not on par with the crime, says Wissam Al Jiburi.
– They were sentenced according to section 27 for drug offences, and it deals with international drug smuggling, this despite the fact that they were arrested in an apartment in Baghdad. I have never experienced anything like this. They got this punishment just because they are Swedes.
SVT Nyheter has been in contact with several Iraqi journalists, who say that this is part of the Iraqi government’s crackdown on drug crime, and that several people have received the death penalty for drug-related crime in recent years.
Four Swedish citizens sentenced to death in Iraq
The 35-year-old man’s family tells SVT Nyheter that they contacted the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and asked for help.
This is the second case in a short time where Swedes have been sentenced to death in Iraq. Three Swedish citizens are convicted of the murder of the former gang leader “Benzema”. SVT has no information that the cases are connected to each other.
On the occasion of the four Swedes sentenced to death, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has summoned Iraq’s chargé d’affaires.