Injustice and Wrongful Imprisonment Case

Twenty years were taken from their lives, and one of them died in prison.

Because of a random arrest. Ahmad al-Dhahabi and Ahmad Allawi

Two men from Ramadi, and the third, Thaer Hamed, from Mosul,

worked as carpenters in Tikrit. All three were arrested in

2005 and charged with kidnapping a married woman.

They spent five months in detention until the woman appeared

in person and cleared them. So far, everything was fine, but the disaster

was what happened afterward. Only about twenty days after their release, they were

arrested again and charged with killing a woman

and her daughter, relatives of the former regime. According to their account,

confessions were extracted from them by force, and the case that had originally been registered against unknown persons was turned

into a case in which they —the three of them—were accused,

and they were sentenced to death. But

while they were in prison, they discovered something that should have brought the whole story

to an end. A murder committed in April 2005,

during the same period when they were already being held over the first case.

But did you think this caused them to get out of the problem they had fallen into?

Of course not. And the case continued for years until their files reached

the

Court of Cassation. In 2011, the verdict was overturned and a decision was issued

to retry them, but the retrial never

took place. The case was sent back to Tikrit, and instead of implementing the cassation decision

and resolving the case,

the matter kept being postponed, again and again, and they remained

in prison, eventually being transferred to Baghdad's Tasfirat prison.

But after Tikrit fell in 2014, everything changed

and the whole arrangement fell apart, because the court holding their case files

was burned, and all the documents and evidence were lost, so even the lawyer

grew tired of the matter, was unable to do anything, and abandoned the case.

They were then transferred to Nasiriyah Prison, and the years passed while they remained inside

prison, with neither the retrial decision being carried out nor them being able to prove

their innocence because the case files had been lost. During those years

sadly, the third of them, Thaer Hamed, died in prison in

2023. As for Ahmed al-Dhahabi and Ahmed Allawi, their ordeal continued

Their families kept appealing, and in 2024 their relatives finally obtained approval to bring them to Tikrit and retry the case.

Finally, their relatives obtained approval to bring them to Tikrit and retry the case.

the trial. The biggest problem remained: how could they prove their innocence after the file and documents had been lost?

The search began again for witnesses, evidence, and old records, until they managed to prove the fundamental truth in the case:

until they managed to prove the fundamental truth in the case, that when the crime took place, the three men were

the three men were in prison, meaning they had nothing to do with the murder.

in prison, meaning they had nothing to do with the murder.

After nearly twenty years from the beginning of the story, their innocence was established and they were released

on December 30, 2025. You can

imagine, they entered this ordeal as young men and came out of it

at around 45 and 50 years of age, after more than twenty years,

and the third man with them, Thaer, never got out at all

and died in prison. God knows how many stories resemble Ahmed's

and Ahmed's and Thaer's, but to this day we know nothing about them, and their owners

are waiting for justice, all because of a malicious complaint.