British diplomat in Sudan was original target for extremists

September 11, 2008 (KHARTOUM) – An extremist group which murdered a US diplomat earlier this year originally had plans to kill a British one, a Sudanese police officer said today.

John Granville, 33, who worked for the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and his 40-year-old Sudanese driver Abdel-Rahman Abbas were hit in their car by a hail of bullets before dawn on New Year’s Day.

There are five suspects currently standing trial for allegedly carrying out the assassination.

Police General Abdel-Rahim Ahmed Abdel-Rahim told the judges today that the suspects planned to kill an unidentified British diplomat to revenge for a British schoolteacher’s Gillian Gibbons decision to let her young students to name a toy bear Muhammad.

Gibbons received a jail sentence of 15 days but was pardoned by Al-Bashir.

The suspects failed to corner the British diplomat to shoot him, the police officer said.

In the preliminary hearing on August 31st the Sudanese prosecutor Mohamed Al-Mustafa Musa said that the group came from the town of Atbara North of the capital Khartoum with the intention of striking Western targets on New Years Eve.

Among those in the dock was a 23-year-old son of the head of Ansar al-Sunna, a pacifist Muslim sect in Sudan that has no political affiliations but has links to the orthodox Wahhabi sect dominant in Saudi Arabia.

The others were listed as an engineering student, a merchant and a former security officer from Khartoum and a driver from Atbara, in northern Sudan.

The judge adjourned the case to September 11 to allow Granville’s family to appoint a lawyer and to find a larger courtroom, at the request of the defense.

The suspects were part of a cell that is believed to have been formed last year after Sudan’s president, Omer Al-Bashir, vehemently rejected the idea of a United Nations peacekeeping mission to Darfur.

Sudanese police said that the suspects received 5,000 Saudi riyals ($9,300) to travel to Somalia and launch Jihad (Islamic holy war) there. However the group members changed their minds for unknown reasons.

But the defendants told the judge that the police extracted confessions from them by force. The group members could face the death sentence if found guilty. The hearing has been adjourned until September 21st.

(ST)