MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA (Bartamaha) — A GOODWILL mission has turned into a nightmare for a Melbourne man who has been imprisoned and tortured in Ethiopia, according to his family.

Sadiq Ahmed, 46, a food inspector from Heidelberg who is an Australian citizen, has been detained since May, his brother Abdalla said yesterday.

The father of four has been in Ethiopia for the past two years, helping to build a hospital with $100,000 in funds raised by Abdalla in Australia.

Abdalla and his sister Malyun yesterday made an impassioned plea for the Australian Government to try to secure his release.

Speaking in Melbourne yesterday, Abdalla said his brother was taken off a bus along with 10 other people by government-backed militia in the Somali province where the hospital is being built.

Somali-born Abdalla, 53, featured in The Age in June last year about how he had given up his job and was driving taxis so he could concentrate on raising money for the hospital in Raaso, a destitute town of 80,000 in the Ethiopian Somali province where his father came from.

Abdalla was in Ethiopia’s capital at the time of his brother’s arrest and was tipped off that the militia were looking for him. He contacted the Canadian consul – Australia has no consul in Ethiopia – who advised he go into hiding and to contact him to accompany him when he was ready to go to the airport, which he did a week later.

Abdalla, president of the Raaso project and a board member of Banyule Community Health, said his brother was imprisoned in the regional capital Jijiga and accused of ”creating unrest”. But Abdalla insisted that ”Sadiq spent two years working in the field and never interfered in any politics”.

He believed tribal rivalry may be behind the arrest, with sensitivities touched off by the project’s focus on neglect in Raaso, where ”every morning there is a row of babies waiting to be buried because the women can’t make it to a hospital”.

The family say Mr Ahmed has been shackled, beaten with rifle butts and sentenced to seven years’ jail without trial. Mr Ahmed’s wife Bishar, who is pregnant, managed to visit him recently and saw he was injured.

Malyun, a social worker, is angry that the only ”help” that the Department of Foreign Affairs has been providing is the passing of information that they already know, with no consular visit made to her brother.

In frustration, they wrote three weeks ago to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Foreign Minister Stephen Smith. ”I am sure if Australia’s prime minister was to phone Ethiopia’s prime minister, it would take one call for my brother to be released,” Abdalla said. They have not received a reply.