(Reuters) – A Pennsylvania man has been charged by U.S. federal prosecutors with torturing an worker at a building undertaking that the defendant was managing in Iraq’s Kurdistan region in 2015 after the worker raised issues about a program to provide weapons components.
Ross Roggio, of Stroudsburg, was accused of suffocating the sufferer with a belt, threatening to chop off one of many particular person’s fingers and directing Kurdish troopers to inflict different extreme bodily and psychological ache and struggling, the U.S. Justice Department mentioned in a assertion https://bit.ly/3oZbp5x on Friday.
Roggio, 53, is the second American citizen – and the fourth individual general – to be charged with violating a U.S. torture statute that into impact in 1994, the division mentioned. He was charged with one depend of conspiracy to commit torture and one depend of torture.
“The grand jury fees that the defendant directed and took part in the systematic torture of an worker over the course of 39 days by Kurdish troopers in Iraq,” mentioned John Gurganus, the U.S. legal professional in Pennsylvania dealing with the case.
Roggio and the Roggio Consulting Company LLC beforehand had been charged in a 37-count indictment in 2018 with illegally exporting firearms components and instruments from the United States to Iraq as a part of the weapons undertaking in Kurdistan.
The new indictment added the torture fees to the beforehand charged offenses.
Roggio Consulting didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
The Justice Department mentioned Roggio was managing a undertaking in 2015 to assemble a manufacturing facility and produce weapons in Kurdistan when considered one of his staff raised issues. Roggio organized for Kurdish troopers to abduct the worker and detain the worker at a Kurdish navy compound, it added.
If convicted, Roggio faces a most sentence of 20 years in jail for every of the torture fees in addition to a most complete statutory penalty of 705 years in jail for the remaining 37 counts, the division mentioned.
The sufferer was not recognized in the division’s announcement on Friday.
(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Will Dunham)
