The Fife sister of a retired geologist who spent months fearing death row in Iraq says Liz Truss failed him when she was foreign secretary.
Ruth Zuccarello, who stays in Kirkcaldy, said the new prime minister didn’t push hard enough for Jim Fitton’s release before trial and never wrote directly to family members.
“She wasn’t up to the foreign office job,” Ms Zuccarello told The Courier.
“Will she be up to the job as prime minister? I have concerns.
“If Liz Truss had intervened, that would have changed the whole situation.”
Mr Fitton, originally from Bath, was detained by Iraqi authorities in March and later given a 15-year jail term over claims he tried to smuggle historical artefacts out of the country.
He had collected shards of broken pottery while touring the Middle Eastern country and was assured he would be allowed to take them home.
‘Mental agony’
While Mr Fitton was eventually freed, his sister insists he could have been spared a trial if the foreign office had intervened sooner.
Ms Zuccarello said: “There was never any direct response from Liz Truss, not to anybody who wrote to her, not to family members and not to MPs.
“The opportunity was missed to have his case closed at the start. This was the reason why we all wrote straight away, urging for immediate action.
“Closure of the case at the start would have recognised his innocence. This was the outcome of his appeal.”
She added: “They had the chance to put things right at the start and prevent injustice.
“But they chose not to. They put us through four months of mental agony. I find that hard to take.”
Ms Zuccarello’s local MP, Neale Hanvey, regularly pressured ministers to do more and criticised the lack of action from Ms Truss.
He said: “For an MP to write about a humanitarian issue on behalf of his constituent, to then receive no response is outrageous.
“There was a complete reluctance for anyone in government to do anything substantive. They were not engaging at all.”
The UK Government has regularly rejected claims they neglected Mr Fitton’s case and insist they were doing all they could to free him.
In May Tory minister James Cleverly – who has since succeeded Ms Truss in the foreign office – said he was “proud” of work being done to help Mr Fitton and other British nationals abroad.
Mr Cleverly said officials in Iraq were regularly checking in on the geologist while he was detained.
But according to the Tory minister’s own testimony, Mr Fitton went three full weeks without any consular visits from April 4 to April 25.
His sister said: “As somebody who was sitting in a cell under threat of the death penalty, he suffered a lot during that long gap with no visits.”
While Ms Zucarrello placed blame on Ms Truss, she said wider bureaucratic hurdles were also at fault for the lack of action from the foreign office.
She said: “It’s a huge bureaucratic machine. It’s the bureaucracy that counts, and the people are not so important.
‘We went through hell’
“A petition shouldn’t be necessary for pushing a government to do the right thing.
“We should be able to take it for granted that a government looks after its citizens. That is what I found shocking.
She added: “It was very distressing. It was a lot of hard work. We all went through hell.”
The Foreign Office said ministers were engaged on the issue, but could not interfere in another country’s legal system.