Jim and his wife. Source: AP via BBC News.
66-year-old Jim Fitton has been sentenced to 15 years jail after he was convicted by an Iraqi court of trying to smuggle artefacts older than 200 years old.
Mr Fitton was at the Sumerian archaeological site of Eridu in southern Iraq when he collected several artefacts. 12 shards of pottery were found in his possession at Baghdad airport, where he was arrested on March 20 alongside German Volker Waldmann for the same crime.
It was found by Judge Jabir Abd Jabir that Mr Fitton had criminal intent to smuggle them out of Iraq.
Mr Waldmann was not handed a sentenced and is set for release, after an investigation revealed he did not have criminal intent, with his lawyers having argued that he was simply storing the shards in his suitcase for the Briton. Lawyer for Mr Fitton, Thair Soud was shocked at the verdict.
“I thought the worst-case scenario would be one year, with suspension.”
Mr Soud tried to argue that Mr Fitton had a lack of knowledge around Iraq’s antiquities law and had no idea that what he did was illegal. He is set to appeal the sentence, telling The Guardian that the wrong law was applied.
“These [items] are the types of things that you can find in a desert abandoned and without a fence, warning signs, protection, or security. If they even had the value of one Iraqi dinar, you couldn’t find a single item, because they would have been all collected and sold.
“We have given the court substantial evidence that he didn’t mean to steal antiques and all he had on his person was abandoned stuff which doesn’t have any value.”
Under Iraqi law, illegal excavation or looting of items that are older than 200 years old is a punishable offence of up to 15 years in jail, with an adjacent fine. Trafficking such objects, could result in a fine of up to 1,000,00 Iraqi Dinars as well as a maximum prison sentence of 10 years.
More details to come.
