US embassy in Sudan denies involvement in alleged sabotage plot

July 16, 2007 (KHARTOUM, Sudan) — The American embassy in Khartoum denied Monday allegations by Sudanese officials that the U.S. was involved in an alleged plot to destabilize the government.

“We categorically deny any connection with this alleged conspiracy,” the U.S. embassy said in a statement.

Sudanese authorities arrested Saturday a prominent opposition figure, a former minister and some 15 other people saying they were planning to threaten “the country’s political and developmental stability,” the official SUNA news agency said.

The U.S. embassy said it had noticed a statement in the media by top presidential adviser Nafie Ali Nafie “accusing the U.S. of involvement” in the alleged plot.

“We do not know if this plot is real, but it is a distraction of the real challenges facing Sudan” the embassy said, citing the “suffering of millions of innocent people” in Darfur and the government’s slowness in fulfilling a separate peace deal in southern Sudan.

Opposition party members said police stormed the houses of several suspects on Saturday, arresting Mubarak al-Fadil along with former Minister of Tourism, Abdel Jelil al-Basha, and 15 others.

A cousin of former Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi, al-Fadil became an assistant to the Sudanese president before rejoining the opposition in 2004. He lead a splinter faction of the Umma party, one of Sudan’s largest.

“The former presidential assistant was arrested along with a number of retired army generals, including retired general Mohamed Ali Hamid, who worked as deputy director for security,” the semiofficial Sudan Media Center said Saturday. The news agency quoted what it described as a high-ranking security official close to the case.

Sudan’s council of ministers praised security services on Sunday for having arrested the alleged plotters. The ministers condemned “any attempt that threatens the country’s political and developmental stability, endangers the citizens’ safety or cripples the democratic process,” SUNA said.

The cabinet praised the security services for rounding up the suspects “twenty four hours before they implemented their sabotage attempt,” SUNA said.

Umma party officials have denied the allegations against al-Fadil and others.

Security officials said al-Fadil had sought support from Libya. The officials said Libya had turned him down and informed Sudanese authorities.

Other officials had alleged a “great power” was involved in the alleged plot, but Ali Nafie, a hard-line adviser to President Omar al-Bashir, was the first to explicitly refer to the U.S.

Al-Fadil and his partners had planned to “call on the international community for immediate intervention” in Sudan after bringing violence to the capital and making the situation ungovernable for al-Bashir, said Interior Minister Zubair Bashir Taha.

The interior minister said the plot came at a time when his country had “succeeded in reaching an understanding with the international community…on the hybrid operation to boost peace in Darfur in a manner that preserves the sovereignty of Sudan all over it territories”.

Sudan had resisted for months a push for U.N. peacekeepers to deploy in Darfur, where over 200,000 people have died and 2,5 million been displaced in four years of fighting with local rebels.

Khartoum’s regime has repeatedly said it would refuse to let the U.N. in because the world body’s policies reflected the hostile views of the U.S. government against the Sudanese government. But it finally agreed in June to let a “hybrid mission” of U.N. and African Union peacekeepers deploy jointly to try to end Darfur’s violence.

(AP)