A U.S. contractor running a weapons factory in northern Iraq was arrested Thursday on federal charges that he abducted and tortured a Kurdish employee for 39 days, suffocating him until he lost consciousness, shocking him with a stun gun, and threatening to lop off the man’s finger with a bolt cutter.
That’s according to a superseding indictment returned this week by a Pennsylvania grand jury, which details a raft of gruesome allegations that could land Ross William Roggio, 53, in prison for 20 years. Roggio is the second U.S. citizen ever to be charged with violating a 1994 statute making it illegal for Americans to commit torture abroad. The new charges come on top of a 37-count indictment filed against Roggio in 2018 accusing him of illegally exporting firearms parts and tools to Iraq, which alone could put the Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, resident away for a maximum of 705 years.
“The heinous acts of violence that Ross Roggio directed and inflicted upon the victim were blatant human rights violations that will not be tolerated,” FBI Assistant Director Luis Quesada said in a statement issued Friday. “This superseding indictment underscores that the United States stands for the rule of law and will hold accountable anyone who commits acts of torture, regardless of where it takes place.”
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In 2015, Roggio inked a deal with Kurdish officials to build and operate a facility in Iraq’s Kurdistan region which would produce fully automatic rifles and carbines for Kurdish soldiers. But when one of Roggio’s employees later “raised concerns” about the project, claiming Roggio could not deliver all that he had promised and was diverting funds for his personal use, things took a dark turn, prosecutors assert in court filings.
To prevent the unidentified whistleblower from interfering with the business, Roggio “arranged for armed Kurdish soldiers in uniform to abduct the victim at his residence…place a bag over the victim’s head, and take the victim against his will to a nearby Kurdish military compound,” the superseding indictment states.
For the next five-plus weeks, Roggio “led multiple interrogation sessions” during which the employee suffered agonizing physical and psychological abuse, prosecutors say.
Among other things, the indictment claims Roggio and the soldiers used a plastic bag to suffocate the man until he blacked out and thought he was going to die, and used a Taser to “inflict repeated electrical shocks to the victim’s arms, throat, nose, and groin, to the point where the victim’s arms bled and his hands twitched uncontrollably.” The documents also allege he applied “pressure to one of the victim’s fingers with the blades of a large cutting tool similar to a bolt cutter, increasing the pressure while threatening to cut off the finger,” forced the victim to run barefoot over sharp gravel, and jumped “violently on the victim’s chest while wearing military boots, as the victim lay prone on the floor.”
At one point during the alleged orgy of abuse, Roggio “wrapped his belt around the victim’s neck, yanked the victim off the ground and suspended the victim in the air, causing the victim to lose consciousness,” the indictment states. “As the victim regained consciousness, at Roggio’s direction, a Kurdish soldier beat the victim in the groin with a stick.”
While the victim was being held in captivity, Roggio repeatedly warned the man that he might not make it out alive, the filing goes on. Roggio also brought other employees to the military compound to witness the torture sessions, it says.
In court filings related to the previous charges against Roggio, he is accused of skirting U.S. export laws by lying to authorities about the ultimate end-users of the firearms he was shipping overseas.
Roggio, who operated Roggio Consulting out of his parents' home in Pennsylvania, had already been through two failed business ventures when he established the weapons factory in Kurdistan, according to court filings reviewed by The Daily Beast.
“Roggio Arsenal, the first manufacturing venture, was located in Fayetteville, North Carolina and produced AR-15 style weapons, which are the semi-automatic civilian version of the M16 military rifle,” states a 2019 motion by the government. “Roggio Arsenal went out of business in 2010. In 2014, Roggio also attempted to manufacture weapons under the name Rebel Arms, a business that failed in the planning stages and was located in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania.”
The motion explains that the feds’ investigation into Roggio began in 2016 when an official at a private firm in Connecticut called the FBI to report a “suspicious shipment of gun manufacturing tools,” saying that “a customer by the name of Ross Roggio had purchased items from the company and had them delivered to Roggio’s residential address in Pennsylvania before being transshipped to Iraq.”
In the filing, prosecutors say Roggio tried to explain away his overseas activities to U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers who stopped him at JFK International Airport by claiming he had actually been “overseeing the construction of three high-rise residential buildings in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq.”
Roggio told investigators that he had already been through his own personal hell on the project, insisting that he had been kidnapped at Kurdistan’s Sulaymaniyah Airport in December 2016 over a payment dispute with his local partners.
“Roggio stated that the kidnappers took his passport and that he was scared and he thought that he was going to die,” the filing states, adding that Roggio claimed that he “was forced to transfer money from his account into the kidnapper’s account little by little, and that he transferred approximately $200,000 into the kidnapper’s account.”
He said he later escaped by “jumping through a window at two o’clock in the morning,” after which he paid a friend $250 to drive him to the U.S. embassy.
“Roggio stated no one knew of his kidnapping,” according to the filing.
Efforts by The Daily Beast to reach Roggio or his associates on Friday were unsuccessful. A judge on Thursday ordered Roggio detained after he pleaded not guilty. An attorney listed in court records as having represented Roggio told The Daily Beast in an email that she was terminated from the case in 2019. Roggio’s remaining defense counsel, Gino A. Bartolai Jr., did not respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment.
“This defendant leveraged his position and used foreign soldiers in order to intimidate and coerce someone who was a threat to the success of his corrupt scheme,” FBI Philadelphia Special Agent in Charge Jacqueline Maguire said in a statement. “Whether in the United States or on foreign soil, heinous acts like torture violate our laws. The FBI has a global reach and working in concert with our federal and international partners, will pursue justice for any victim—here or abroad—who suffers at the hands of an American citizen.”
Roggio’s trial on all charges is scheduled to begin June 27. The U.S. government has already moved to seize his home, a $200,000 McLaren 570S sports car, a $150,000 BMW i8, a Mercedes GL350 BlueTEC, four gold Rolexes, and some 170 firearms and accessories in his possession.
