Sudanese police closes PC’s headquarters and arresting three more party leaders, Turabi’s Son
KHARTOUM, Sudan, April 01, 2004 (AP) — The government’s crackdown against detained Sudanese opposition leader and Islamic fundamentalist Hassan Turabi continued Thursday, with his sons saying security forces closed the headquarters of their father’s political party overnight, hours after arresting three more senior party members following the discovery of an alleged coup plot.
Mohamed Omar Turabi told The Associated Press that authorities are also preventing relatives from visiting his father, who was arrested at dawn arrest Wednesday for what the government described as issuing a provocative statement that advocated “regionalism and tribalism.”
The official Sudan Media Center said Thursday that at least 10 policemen have been detained in connection with an alleged plot to overthrow Sudanese President el-Bashir, taking the number of people arrested in the planned overthrow to at least 30.
That number includes Turabi, a former el-Bashir ally, and three senior officials from his Popular Congress Party who were arrested Wednesday.
The government acknowledged for the first time on Wednesday that it had thwarted a plan to oust el-Bashir by arresting 10 soldiers, including a colonel, and seven members of Turabi’s party.
“The group was planning to carry out its plot in the coming few days, as a pre-emptive move to abort the current peace process in the country,” Defense Minister Bakri Hassan Salih told an extraordinary Cabinet meeting on Wednesday, according to state-run television.
Turabi’s party Monday said in a statement that Sudanese police had arrested several party leaders and army officers in connection with an alleged coup plot by soldiers, police and security officials from Sudan ‘s restive Western Darfur province.
“We believe all this is being made up by the government to find a reason for cracking down on the Popular Congress and its members,” Mohamed Omar Turabi, son of the detained party leader, told The Associated Press.
He said security officials early Thursday closed the Khartoum headquarters of his father’s embattled political party and its provincial offices.
“We don’t know what he (Turabi) is doing now, we were not able to visit him,” Turabi’s son said.
Another of Turabi’s sons criticized the latest government crackdown against his father.
“We are a family and we have kids (and) we are fed up with people knocking at our doors … arresting our father,” Omar Hassan Turabi said. “It affects us but what can we do (as) those people (the security authorities) are unjust.”
Turabi, a lawyer with degrees from universities in the U.K. and France, was the main ideologue of the Islamic fundamentalist government that was set up after el-Bashir seized power in 1989. The two men fell out in 1999 when el-Bashir accused Turabi, then the speaker of parliament, of trying to grab power and stripped him of his position.
After signing a memorandum in 2001 with the southern rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army that encouraged any resistance against the government, Turabi was placed under house arrest and his party was banned.
He was released and the ban lifted last October amid a reform drive by el-Bashir. The move was seen as an effort to bring some northern opposition groups into a united front to strengthen his government in peace talks with the southern rebels.
The overture to Turabi was short-lived. In November, first Vice President Ali Osman Mohamed Taha accused Turabi’s party of fomenting the trouble in Darfur.
In the 1990s, when Turabi had great influence over the government, Sudan was a haven for Muslim extremists such as Osama bin Laden