Four men to stand trial for murder of Sudanese businessman
KHARTOUM, Oct 16 (AFP) — Four men will stand trial on charges of the murder in N’Djamena last month of a Sudanese businessman and member of parliament who was setting up an oil refinery in Chad, police said Thursday.
A joint Sudanese-Chadian committee interrogated the four defendants who confessed to their role in Ibn Omar Idris Yousuf’s murder and decided there was enough evidence for a trial, the Sudanese police spokesman’s office said.
Yousuf, head of the Khartoum-based Exports Bank, was shot dead in the Chadian capital on September 25 while at the wheel of his car by two men on a motorcycle who then fled.
The police spokesman’s office said the motive for the crime appears to have been a business dispute between Ibn Omar and another man, who judicial sources in Chad said was from the same western Darfur region of Sudan as his victim.
The office here was quoting information from Colonel Majdi Kamal Bagir, director of Khartoum State Investigation department and member of the team which recently returned from N’Djamena but who did not name the defendants.
No trial date was given, however.
Ibn Omar had close ties with Sudan’s neighbour Chad, whose President Idriss Debe had decorated him less than two weeks before his murder. He was in the country for the construction of an oil refinery whose contract he had won.
Judicial authorities in Chad said October 1 that four men had been arrested on charges of “murder and conspiracy to commit murder.”
The judicial sources said the man charged with ordering the killing was another Sudanese businessman, identified only as Mr Adouma, from the Darfur region. He was charged with “complicity” in the murder.
The Chadian bi-weekly newspaper N’Djamena reported June 12 that the Chadian authorities, at the request of Khartoum, had deported Adouma to Sudan, along with 30 Sudanese nationals from the Darfur region.
In early September, Deby helped mediate a six-week ceasefire in a rebellion that has troubled the western Darfur states since February.