A security force detained Amer Abdullah Najm al-Jumaili, a lecturer at the University of Mosul, on Monday after he alleged in a Facebook comment that state land near an ancient Assyrian site in Nineveh province was being handed to influential figures, a source told Shafaq News.

Al-Jumaili, who is two months from retirement after nearly 40 years in education, also serves as a court-appointed expert on antiquities and manuscripts for the Nineveh appeals courts.

No official information was available on the authority holding him, where he is being held, or any charges against him.

In his comment, al-Jumaili said the director of the Nineveh Antiquities and Heritage Inspectorate, Rowaid al-Laila, a former student of his, invited him two years ago to inspect test excavations meant to establish that a plot of land was not an archaeological site.

Al-Jumaili said he was not convinced. He wrote that he found ancient pottery fragments there and that, while the plot is not itself a recognized archaeological site, it is historically linked to the nearby Neo-Assyrian site of Khirbet al-Qadiya, a site associated with the 9th-century BCE Assyrian king Tukulti-Ninurta II, and lies close to the Syriac Christian site of Bawira and the Mar Gorgis monastery.

He said he refused a request to sign a report declaring the land non-archaeological after hearing that it would not go to a group of elderly Mosul sports veterans, as officials had claimed, but to senior officials, former University of Mosul presidents, and the children of ministers, judges and officers.

Al-Laila has not publicly responded to the allegations.

The University of Mosul, which identified al-Jumaili as a lecturer in the Syriac Language Department of its College of Education for Humanities, said he was detained entirely outside the campus. It denied that any security force had entered its colleges to carry out the arrest.

His wife, Mona Haider, an educator in Nineveh, had told Shafaq News that she lost contact with him while he was on campus and later learned that a security force had taken him to an undisclosed location.

In an appeal to Prime Minister Ali Faleh al-Zaidi, the family said al-Jumaili was detained for refusing to sign documents that would squander state land, and demanded his immediate release and an urgent investigation into those it accused of using security and judicial influence to settle scores.

"Who is held to account in Iraq, the honest man or the corrupt thief?" the family asked. The appeal also criticized the university's leadership for failing to defend him.