JEM leader killed in NATO style bombing of Gaddafi – Turabi
December 26, 2011 (KHARTOUM) – The head of the Popular Congress Party (PCP) Hassan al-Turabi likened the recent killing of a Darfur rebel leader to the slaying of late Libyan ex-top man Muammar Gaddafi last October after his convoy was hit by NATO warplanes.
The Darfur rebel group issued a statement on Sunday saying that regional powers were involved in the assassination of its leader. JEM spokesperson Gibreel Adam Bilal told Sudan Tribune that Ibrahim was killed in his sleep in a strike conducted by a fighter jet around 3am.
Bilal denied that Ibrahim was killed in the ongoing battles between JEM and the Sudanese army in North Kordofan state.
Several rebel sources privately accuse two neighboring countries and an Arab Gulf state of coordinating the killing of Ibrahim using a drone aircraft.
Turabi paid condolences to Ibrahim’s family in Khartoum but rejected suggestions that this proves the PCP link with JEM, which the government has been alleging for years. He emphasised that he disagreed with the methods Ibrahim used to fight the regime.
The Islamist opposition leader said his disagreements with Ibrahim were similar to his reservations towards the late al-Qaeda head Osama Bin Laden whom he said used “harmful force”.
“I won’t do that” Turabi said before adding “If Islamists in the [Sudanese] army worked staged a coup and overthrew the regime I won’t be with them. That’s it. Our religious thought has developed”.
Turabi was the mastermind behind the 1989 coup led by president Omer Hassan Al-Bashir. But the pair fell out following the introduction of a bill to limit the president’s powers in 1999, a move which the president resisted by dissolving parliament and declaring a state of emergency.
“What I said about Bin laden applies to Khalil. I know him as an Islamist, a top-class Islamist. I know he is a patriot, a leader and a brave man for his cause and it was him who started negotiations in Doha [with Khartoum]” Turabi said.
“But the accord was betrayed after the government kicked out aid agencies and refused to release his POW’s” he added.
He also expressed fear that Darfur might eventually secede in a similar way to South Sudan which became an independent state last July.
Turabi also vehemently denied remarks attributed to him saying that Ibrahim picked a successor describing it as a “fabrication’.
He also dismissed links between the detention of his aide Ibrahim al-Sanoosi on his way back from Juba and JEM’s recent offensive.
(ST)