KHARTOUM: Two Sudanese political activists allegedly tortured during two months in detention were released yesterday along with a third activist, the mother of one said.
“Thanks be to God,” said Sabah Osman Mohammed, whose son Tajalsir Jaafar, 28, was among those freed.
She said Jaafar had just contacted her by telephone to say that he, Mohammed Salah and Moamer Musa Mohammed had been released.
They were in a car and had not yet reached her home, she said.
The three were detained outside the University of Khartoum on May 12, according to Girifna, a non-violent movement seeking an end to President Omar Hasan Bashir’s government.
The university had been in turmoil, with clashes between pro-government youths and their opponents, after a student was killed during a campus rally for peace in the western region of Darfur.
Mashood Adebayo Baderin, the United Nations independent expert on human rights in the Sudan, told reporters in late June that he was concerned about the cases of all three youths.
Speaking at the end of his latest mission to Sudan, Baderin said he “had information from various sources” that Salah “was being tortured.”
Baderin said that if the National Intelligence and Security Service had a case against the youths they should be brought to court.
Otherwise they should be freed, he said.
After visiting Salah in detention, his family issued a statement saying his body bore signs of physical abuse.
The weeping mother of Jaafar said at a July 5 press conference that he had been beaten about the face.
If the family has such a complaint it should be taken to a prosecutor, rather than being raised in the media, a security source responded in comments said.
SIDI BOUZID: Tunisian police fired tear gas overnight to disperse protesters demanding the release of suspected members of an Al Qaeda-linked group arrested in the restive Sidi Bouzid region, the government said yesterday.
Eight people were detained in a “sweeping security operation” in the central province, targeting radical Islamists belonging to the banned Ansar Al Sharia group and wanted by the authorities, the interior ministry said. Relatives of those arrested protested overnight in front of a police post in Sidi Bouzid demanding their release, ministry spokesman Mohamed Ali Aroui said.
Some of the protesters shouted “taghout” at the police, a traditional Arabic term for tyrant which is sometimes used by hardline Salafists to refer to police and soldiers.
The security forces then fired tear gas to disperse the demonstrators, who numbered a few dozen.
Since the 2011 revolution, Tunisia has witnessed the rise of jihadist groups that were suppressed under the ousted of regime of strongman Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.
Much of the deadly violence that has rocked the country since the first Arab Spring uprising has been blamed on Ansar Al Sharia, a hardline Salafist movement which the authorities have linked to Al-Qaeda and implicated in the killing of two opposition politicians last year.AFP
