WASHINGTON — When Baghdad’s central criminal court sentenced Ayham al-Sa’ammarae to two years in jail Wednesday, he appealed to what he thought was a higher authority.

It was neither God nor another Iraqi court, but an American with a cell phone.

Upon hearing his sentence, the former Iraqi electricity minister pleaded that he was an American citizen and that he would be killed in custody.

The gambit seemed to work. A group of armed Americans — they were either soldiers or plain-clothed security consultants; accounts vary — whisked the convicted embezzler out of the courtroom, through a tunnel attached to the building’s basement, and into a safe house inside the fortified Green Zone. Mr. Sa’ammarae then placed calls to Arab satellite stations announcing that he was in American custody.

But in a few hours, Mr. Sa’ammarae was returned to the Iraqis, two American officials who requested anonymity said.

The incident in Baghdad this week underscores the fragility of Iraq’s democratic institutions. President Bush has emphasized repeatedly that America is fighting for the country’s fledgling democracy. Yet for a foreign power to extract a man after he is tried and convicted is an affront to the independence of the courts America helped establish.

But in many ways, Mr. Sa’ammarae is a special case. The former chief of the Coalition Provisional Authority, Paul Bremer, appointed him to oversee the electrification of Iraq.

Mr. Sa’ammarae kept the portfolio in 2004 when the CPA transferred sovereignty to the interim regime of Ayad Allawi.

A Sunni Arab, Mr. Sa’ammarae was the interlocutor between the Sunni insurgents and the Iraqi government at the Arab League summit in November 2005. American officials say he enjoyed top-level access to the White House and met with the national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, last year.

But Mr. Sa’ammarae is also a crook, according to Iraq’s central criminal court. Iraq’s burgeoning press has followed his case and sentence closely, reporting that he pilfered hundreds of millions of dollars through phony contracts he approved when he oversaw the Electricity Ministry.

“We are talking about hundreds of millions of dollars,” a member of the Iraqi parliament, Mithal al-Alusi, told The New York Sun. “The two-year sentence is the first sentence. He has 12 counts against him for corruption.”

Mr. Alusi said he is happy the former minister was returned to Iraqi custody. “Normally, if there is an American mistake, it would take months or a year to correct,” he said. “I am so happy this was corrected in two or three hours. This is a correction to the old view that the Americans were above the law, and this is very good news.”

Indeed, one source of tension between Baghdad and Washington has been the status of the American forces in Iraq. American soldiers and security contractors are not subject to any Iraqi law, in part due to the absence of a status of forces agreement. Such pacts outline the status of troops in Japan and Germany.

American officials would not talk about Mr. Sa’ammarae on the record yesterday. However, two officials confirmed the Arab press reports about his case, with one key exception. At no point was Mr. Sa’ammarae taken to the American Embassy or its annex, they said.

“When he was claiming that he thought he was in danger and wanted protection, we decided to hear him out,” one official said. “But we realized that he was making this noise after he had been convicted. This thing was handled pretty quickly and he was placed back into Iraqi custody. Wiser heads prevailed.”

Mr. Alusi said he is not angry with the Americans who whisked Mr. Sa’ammarae away. “The mistake was not the soldiers, who have to help an American citizen, but with Paul Bremer, who made this man the electricity minister,” he said. “This is why we were always asking for these kinds of jobs. We said you cannot keep dual citizenship and serve in the Iraqi government.”