An MP is stepping up pressure on the Government to help a businessman held by American forces in Iraq on terrorism charges.

Kadhum Ridha Al-Sarraj, 29, who lives in Carshalton, was arrested on September 15 after a heart monitor he created was mistaken for a bomb.

Mr Al-Sarraj, a salesman with medical equipment supplier Matana, is being held in Camp Cropper where former President Saddam Hussein was held prior to receiving the death penalty.

Previously Foreign Office minister Bill Rammell has said he would not be able to help Mr Al-Sarraj, who holds a "spousal" visa in the UK, as he is an Iraqi national.

But Mr Brake said he believed Mr Rammel owed a “moral and diplomatic" duty to help Mr Al-Sarraj who has been locked up for four months and would emphasise his point at a meeting with him in the next few weeks.

He said: “This man is married to a British citizen. She’s lost her husband into a camp which he may not emerge from anytime soon.

“It will now get only “I think that the minister has a moral responsibility, if not a diplomatic one to be more helpful than he has been."

Mr Brake said he was also concerned that, since the Americans had handed over control to the Iraqis, getting information from the camp would become much harder.

Mr Al-Sarraj’s wife Shereen Nasser, 24, a research assistant, who has employed a lawyer in Baghdad to help with the case, said: “We have not been able to see him since December 9 and our next visit is February 21.

“We have no other way of getting in contact with him, so we don’t know how he is doing. I feel like I’m hitting my head against a brick wall.’’ Previously Mrs Nasser has claimed that the Americans have no good reason to hold him and have admitted that he is innocent.

However last year Major Neal V Fisher II, from the Task Force 134 unit in charge of detainee control in Iraq has said Mr Al-Sarraj was “a threat to the security of Iraq”.

Mrs Nasser said she believed her husband’s MSc degree project measuring cardiac output fell into American hands after his family’s Baghdad home was burgled two years ago when the family fled the city.

Mr Al-Sarraj’s device was stolen along with other belongings and when the Americans gained possession, they dusted it for fingerprints which then sparked the security alert when Mr Al-Sarraj returned to the country to sell pacemakers.

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