KHARTOUM, 19 October 2004 — Jailed Sudanese Islamist Hassan Turabi will face charges in court for trying to topple the government, a high-level security source said yesterday. Turabi, formerly a close ally to President Omar Hassan Bashir, was arrested at the end of March this year after his party was loosely linked to a plot by a group of military officers to topple the government.
He was later moved into a safe house outside Khartoum but went back to Kobar prison in Khartoum last month after the government said his opposition Popular Congress party had conspired to assassinate top leaders and blow up strategic places in Khartoum on Sept. 24.
The sources said the security services had now completed the investigation into the plot and would be presenting the case to the courts. “We are going to take them to court. We have finished our investigation and the police are now trying to get the case in front of the court for more than 60 of them,” the source said. “Turabi, he’s now also inside the case.”
The source said all would face charges of trying to topple the government. “There’s strong evidence against his people. He will also stand in front of the court,” the source added. The government has said it would take legal action against the party, which could lead to it being banned.
Meanwhile, Sudan’s security chief said yesterday rebels in the western region of Darfur have drawn army fire and aerial bombardment on to Darfur villages by using them as cover and as bases for military operations. In a rare media interview, Salah Gosh told Reuters Sudan had indeed armed tribes and militias to fight the rebels in Darfur, but would not make the same mistake in the country’s east, where tensions are rising along the border with Eritrea.
Attacks on villages by bomber planes, government soldiers or militias have helped drive more than 1.5 million people from their homes in Darfur, creating what the United Nations says is one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. The Sudanese government has not previously explained the aerial bombardment of villages, despite many witness accounts.
After years of skirmishes between Arab nomads and mostly non-Arab farmers over scarce resources in arid Darfur, rebels took up arms last year accusing Khartoum of neglect and of using militias known as Janjaweed to loot and burn non-Arab villages. Khartoum admits arming some militias to fight the rebels but denies any links to the Janjaweed, calling them bandits. Gosh said the rebels would often have their camps next to the villages, which were near water sources, and on many occasions attacked the army from within the villages.
The next round of African Union peace talks between the government and the Darfur region’s rebel groups will start Thursday in Abuja, the AU’s Nigerian chairmanship confirmed yesterday. The decision marks a turnaround since Friday last week, when Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo’s office announced that the conference would be shifted to the Libyan capital Tripoli.
Obasanjo’s spokeswoman Remi Oyo told AFP that the talks would return to Abuja. The first session ran between Aug. 23 and Sept. 18 in the Nigerian capital, but broke up without substantive progress. Darfur rebel groups who were sidelined from the African summit stayed on in Tripoli yesterday for talks with Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi.
