US property developer claims Iraqi president ordered her kidnap and 43 day torture with beatings and electric cords: lawsuit
When her Iraqi captors told Sara Saleem that they were digging her grave outside her prison cell, the real estate developer and engineer began plotting her escape, eventually using a metal spoon to pry off a window frame and fleeing down a drain pipe to safety.Saleem, 47, a US citizen of Kurdish ethnicity, claims she was kidnapped, tortured and held for ransom for more than a month at a prison near Basra in a story with all the twists and turns of a Hollywood thriller.After trying for years to seek justice over her treatment in Iraq, the mother of three is now suing a host of Iraqi government officials as well as terrorist groups Hezbollah and Asa’ib Ahl al-Haqq (AAH) in US federal court for $2 billion.An amended complaint was filed earlier this year in US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, where Saleem lives with her family.Among the defendants in the case is Iraq’s chief justice, Faiq Zidan, and former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who Saleem accuses of plotting her kidnap and then covering up the crime.“He [Zidan] acts with full impunity and is used to getting what he wants,” said Saleem in a Zoom interview with The Post last week from an undisclosed location in the Middle East.
“The corruption in Iraq is unlike corruption in any other nation.”Saleem was kidnapped in Basra, a port city in the country’s southeast, after meeting with government officials about one of her construction projects on September 8, 2014, court papers say.She said she was overwhelmed by a group of men who surrounded her as she tried to drive away in her own car.The men allegedly arrived in vehicles bearing the insignia of al-Maliki, who was at the Prime Minister at that time, according to the lawsuit.Her assailants pulled her out of the vehicle and when she resisted “they smashed her face with a pistol and tased her,” court papers say.
“Once she was restrained, they shoved her into one of their cars and sped away.” What followed was 43 days of t...