A Sudanese man was jailed for 17 years on Wednesday for trying to help the International Criminal Court (ICC) investigate a minister over war crimes in Darfur.
Mohammed el-Sari is the first person to be convicted by Sudanese courts of trying to assist the ICC, which Khartoum does not recognise, and had faced a possible death sentence.
He was arrested in June and accused of trying to solicit information about special police in Darfur, men trained and paid by the government and supervised by Minister of Humanitarian Affairs Ahmed Haroun.
Last year, the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Haroun detailing 51 charges of alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Sudan’s western Darfur region in 2003 and 2004.
Among the charges, which Haroun denies, were the alleged murder and rape of civilians in Darfur while he served as minister of state for the interior.
The judge at the court in Khartoum North also found Sari guilty of spying and threatening national security for wanting to send the information, via an intermediary, to the ICC.
In July, ICC chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo asked the court for an arrest warrant for President Omar el-Beshir himself on 10 counts of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in Darfur.
Sari was accused of wanting to pay police between $10 000 and $100 000 for documents detailing the number of people in special police camps, their names, weapons and training, and a photograph of Haroun visiting them.
A security officer told a previous hearing that Sari had been in contact with an unnamed Jordanian and three Sudanese Americans, one of them his cousin, who were allegedly trying to help him pass the secrets to the ICC.
In court, the accused was painted as a security force reject who had been suspended from the special police and, before that, from army staff college. — Sapa-AFP