A businessman wrongly jailed in Iraq for more than a year on trumped-up terror charges tells his story exclusively in the Sutton Guardian today...

Kadhum Ridha Al Sarraj was finally reunited with his wife in Carshalton last weekend, 17 months after being arrested in Erbil international airport, Northern Iraq, by American military authorities.

Mr Al-Sarraj, a salesman with medical equipment supplier Matana, was arrested after a heart monitor he created was mistaken for a bomb.

Accused of terrorism and held in Camp Cropper detention centre for months without trial, 29-year-old Mr Al Sarraj endured a year-long nightmare.

After a campaign by the Sutton Guardian and Carshalton MP Tom Brake, an innocent Mr Al Sarraj, an Iraqi national with a UK visa, was finally freed in October.

Even then he was unable to return home as his passport had been lost during his arrest and was stuck in Turkey.

Today, safe at home with his wife, research assistant Shereen Nasser, 25, he finally has the strength to tell his harrowing story...

As soldiers pulled a blindfold over his eyes, handcuffed him and lead him from the airport, a shocked and tired Kadhum Al Sarraj thought he was dreaming.

The businessman had been detained by airport security for 18 hours and innocently believed coalition forces would realise their mistake and release him.

But after several days of interrogation in a crowded holding room he was flown to Camp Cropper in Baghdad – where Saddam Hussein was kept before his execution – and the lingering reality of his fate slowly sunk in.

“I kept asking ‘Why are you arresting me? Why? But they didn’t have the answers.

“All the time I was thinking there is a mistake, sometimes I think I’m sleeping and I’m going over and over in my head what is happening. When they flew us to Camp Cropper we had no idea where we were or how long we would stay for.”

Upon arrival prisoners were made to change into yellow suits and ushered into crowded rooms where they were forced to sleep on thin mattresses.

Mr Al Sarraj’s room was 15m by 12m with 60-70 men in it at a time. In a previous holding room 95 men had once squashed against each other.

Interrogations soon began and while their tone was calm and measured, their implication was devastating.

He was accused of terrorism after his fingerprints were found on a heart monitoring device which had been stolen from his Baghdad home two years earlier.

The Americans believed it to be parts for making bombs rather than a heart beat monitor he had created for an MSc project.

Compounding his shock and confusion was the thought his family and wife may think he was dead or missing and he pleaded with pre-release detainees to help get a message to them.

After 12 days a former detainee phoned Mr Al Sarraj’s brother to break the news and two days later he was able to speak to his family.

Slowly he became accustomed to the monotonous days that lay ahead.

Each morning he would be woken with up to 400 fellow prisoners at 4am and taken outside to be counted, which could take up to an hour and would be repeated later in the day.

At 7am prisoners would be handed a breakfast of eggs, bread and tea and then have the choice of walking in a small outside section or sitting inside: Mr Al Sarraj chose to immerse himself in books and focus his mind.

Lunch at midday was soup and in the evening a bland bowl of rice and casserole; a diet that quickly became predictable and boring.

“Most of the people there were surprised like me, I could see the shock on all of the eyes of the people.”

False hope about his release came as devastating blows, but the hardest parts were meeting his wife and family once every two months.

For the first 10 minutes they would be allowed to embrace across a one foot gap and the last hour would be spent talking to each other through a glass window.

Mr Al Sarraj said: “For the first minute it was great, but then you think you have to leave them again and it’s actually worse.

“I tried not to show my suffering or what I was feeling.

“I didn’t want them to worry about me. We didn’t like to talk about the bad stuff.

“It was a nightmare. I would not wish this on anyone.”