At the arrest by the detective, he was required to cooperate and to provide the names of his members in the Irgun, but he denied and refused to cooperate. As a result, he was under severe tortures, which did not exist even during the Turkish rule, but did not reveal information. Segal, who was also detained, heard from Petcho about the tortures, and recorded his comments on the kosher napkin which he got from his wife. The napkin was forwarded to Aryeh Altman, who sent a report to Ze'ev Jabotinsky. Jabotinsky communicated this to the British parliament's deputy Josiah Wedgwood, who submitted an urgent query in the parliament, a few days before the outbreak of the World War II. At the same time, a complaint was filed with the Geneva Mandate Committee, and the British Mandate was reprimanded. When the torture of other members was revealed, the British Mandate got a disgrace mark. On August 24, 1939, Petcho was taken out of the dungeon in Jerusalem and was put in detention at Latrun Prison with Raziel, Meridor and Avraham Stern. After the Irgun's attack on Jaffa, in which Petcho participated, he made his way to Jerusalem on Burma Road and joined the Irgun fighters in Jerusalem who were fighting for the liberation of the Old City. In 1949, he was recruited into the IDF, and due to his gundar rank, he joined an officers' course. During the Suez Crisis he was drafted to the military reserve force, and was released from the IDF afterwards. In August 1959 Petcho was appointed to the Composition Committee for the list of candidates of the Herut Movement for the Tel Aviv-Yafo Municipality. In January–February 1964, Petcho received a certificate of being a prisoner of Zion for his imprisonment for six months in Jerusalem and Tzrifin, with the signatures of Menachem Begin, Eitan Livni, chairman of the Irgun Alliance in Israel, and Yehuda Borochov, a member of Medals and Awards Committee. From the Deputy Minister of Defense, Mordechai Tzipori, he received the campaign medal of the Irgun. Petcho knew Hebrew, Ladino, French and English. Duvdevani, as the director of the Jewish Agency Immigration Department, appointed him to an immigration emissary in Argentina from June 1965 until August 1967. During his mission, Petcho made also diplomatic connections with Uruguay, where his cousin, Jak Petcho, president of the Spanish Jewish community, lived in Montevideo.