A Sudanese court sentenced four Islamists to death for a second time on Monday for the murder of a United States diplomat and his driver in Khartoum last year.
The sentencing came a day after a court prosecutor read out a letter by mother of John Granville, who worked with the US Agency for International Development (USAid), asking for the death penalty.
“The murder of a person is as illegal from shariah’s [Islamic law] point of view as it is in Sudanese criminal law,” the judge, Said Ahmed al-Badri, said when announcing the sentence.
The court had sentenced the men to death in June for killing Granville and his driver Abdel Rahman Abbas in January 2008, but the sentence was cancelled in August after Abbas’s father then forgave the men.
Under Islamic law, the victim’s family has the right to forgive the murderer, ask for compensation or demand execution.
Granville’s mother, Jane Granville, at the time had asked for the men’s execution but her letter was rejected because it was not notarised.
One of the four condemned men is the son of a leader of pacifist Islamist group Ansar al-Sunna, which is linked to Salafism — a hardline form of Sunni Islam practiced mainly in Saudi Arabia — but is not involved in politics.
A group calling itself Ansar al-Tawhid had claimed the New Year’s Day murder according to Site, a US-based organisation which monitors Islamist websites.
It said the murder was in response to attempts to raise the banner of Christianity over Sudan, the largest country in Africa.
FBI officers from the US had helped to investigate the killings which sent shockwaves through the sizeable Western community in Khartoum, a city usually considered one of the safest in Africa. — AFP