The ministry said in a statement that on May 19, a federal court convicted Ross Roggio, 54, of Pennsylvania, of committing “several crimes, including torturing an Estonian citizen in 2015 in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, in connection with the exploitation of an illegal weapon”. factory in Kurdistan.”
The convict faces life imprisonment and is expected to be sentenced on August 23, according to the ministry.
According to the statement, Roggio was found guilty of multiple counts, including “torture, conspiracy to commit torture, conspiracy to commit a crime against the United States, export of weapons and services to Iraq without the approval of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, smuggling of goods, wire fraud and money laundering.”
The statement said that Roggio was working in 2015 on an arms factory project in the autonomous region and that on the sidelines he engaged in illegal activities, including arms smuggling. After the Estonian threatened to report him, Roggio organized his kidnapping with the complicity of “Kurdish soldiers”.
The ministry said it detained the Estonian in a camp, where Roggio “strangled him with a belt, threatened to cut off his finger and repeatedly ordered Kurdish soldiers to beat him, use a stun gun against him and strangle him, on top of that he physically and mentally abused the victim for 39 days.”
U.S. Department of Justice Criminal Records Officer Jonathan Polite says Roggio ‘brutally tortured another human being to prevent his interference in his illegal activities’, saying his ‘responsibility for this brutality’ has been met. possible by “the courage of the victim and other witnesses.”
According to the Justice Department, Roggio is the second American to be convicted of a federal law criminalizing torture outside the United States that took effect in 1994.
In 2009, a US court sentenced the son of former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor to 97 years in prison under this law. “Chucky” Taylor, who was born in the United States and holder of the nationality, was convicted of torture between April 1999 and July 2003 in the West African country.
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