Nine lives for a life
NINE MEN from Darfur have been executed for the murder of a Sudanese newspaper editor.
They were hanged in a prison in Khartoum, in front of the relatives of the editor, Mohammed Taha, whose decapitated body was found a day after he was abducted from his home in Khartoum in 2006.
Amnesty International has condemned the nine men’s conviction, saying it was based on confessions obtained by torture. Ten people had been convicted of the murder but one was later acquitted.
A defence lawyer said an article in al-Wifaq, the paper edited by Mohammed Taha, had angered people from Darfur by downplaying the scale of rape in the civil war and insulting women from the region.
Despite being an Islamist, Mohammed Taha had sparked angry demonstrations when in 2005 he reprinted an article questioning the roots of the Prophet Mohammed. He was put on trial for blasphemy but the charges were dropped.