KHARTOUM (REUTERS) :

Hassan al-Turabi, an influential Islamist, was arrested last week after calling on Sudan’s president to surrender himself to the International Criminal Court to face charges of orchestrating genocide in Darfur.

The Sudanese Media Centre quoted an unnamed security source as saying Turabi and his aides were supporting Darfur’s insurgent Justice and Equality Movement financially and logistically.

“The source has not ruled out presenting Turabi for trial,” it said. It did not name specific charges.
Government sources outside state security, including the ministry of justice, have so far not commented on the reasons for Turabi’s detention. Turabi’s supporters yesterday denied any link to JEM.
Members of his opposition Popular Congress Party said he was arrested to silence him in the build-up to a ruling from the International Criminal Court on whether to issue an arrest warrant against President Omar Hassan al-Bashir for alleged war crimes in Darfur.

The US embassy in Khartoum yesterday said it was “concerned” about the arrest of Turabi and another senior official from his party, adding Sudan needed to respect freedom of expression in the run-up to elections planned in 2009.

Turabi was Bashir’s ideologue until they split in a power struggle in 1999-2000.

International experts say 200,000 people have died since JEM and other rebels took up arms against the government in 2003, accusing it of neglecting the remote western region.

The UN and African Union mission in Darfur (Unamid) aims to deploy 80% of its joint peacekeeping force there by March this year and the rest by June, a senior UN official said yesterday.

Unamid took over from a smaller AU mission last year but is well short of its promised strength of 26,000 troops. Susana Malcorra, the UN’s head of department of field support, said it was vital troop-contributing nations prepare their forces.

“We have now achieved over 60% deployment,” she told a meeting of UN, AU and Sudanese officials in Addis Ababa. “It is critical that troop-contributing countries undertake the range of pre-deployment preparations as rapidly as possible.”

Mutref Sediq, state minister in Sudan’s foreign ministry, said his government remained committed to facilitating the full deployment of Unamid.