Students in Khartoum accused Sudanese authorities of abducting, torturing and killing a colleague from Darfur, as tensions rose a day before campaigns opened for the first democratic elections in 24 years.
Police who delivered the body to a morgue said they had found the body of Mohamed Musa, 23, on the street and denied he had ever been arrested.
“We consider this to be a normal crime,” a security source said, adding four other Darfuri students had been arrested on Thursday at the morgue for causing “public disorder”.
Dozens of Khartoum University students from Darfur gathered in the morgue to mourn on Friday. Witnesses who had seen the body said his hands were burned, his head and body beaten, cut and swollen and his clothes soaked in blood.
“He was taken from the gate of the university by a group of men in a pick-up truck,” Darfuri student Mutasim Boker told Reuters.
He blamed the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) for the abduction on Wednesday, saying they were always targeting and beating Darfuri students. “This was definitely NCP … this is not the first time they have targeted us.”
Another Darfuri student at the morgue, Mohamed Adam, told Reuters he thought an anonymous call informing students that the body was in the morgue had come from government authorities.
“His hands were burnt, his skin cut up … and his clothes soaked in blood,” he said, after seeing the body.
A correspondent for the Sudanese website Sudaneseonline.com, Nagla Seedahmed, said police had tried to arrest her at the morgue and confiscate a photo she had of the body.
ELECTIONS “THREATENED”
“This raises a lot of doubts on how we are going to have a free and fair election,” said leading presidential candidate Yasir Arman, from the former southern rebel Sudan Liberation People’s Movement (SPLM), who visited the morgue.
He said the murder echoed dozens of similar crimes by the security services, urged an investigation and said a law passed by the NCP last year giving the security organs wide powers of arrest, search and seizure must be repealed.
“It is clear now that this security law threatens the democratic process and the elections and it should be repealed.”
U.N.-appointed expert on human rights Mohamed Chande Othman this week expressed concern at such laws ahead of April’s complex elections. On Saturday the official campaign period opens.
Sudan’s opposition say April’s elections cannot be credible while the seven-year-old conflict continues in the vast western region of Darfur. It remains under emergency law, with sporadic clashes and more than 2 million people languishing in camps.
The United Nations estimates 300,000 people have died in Darfur’s humanitarian crisis since mostly non-Arab rebels took up arms in early 2003 accusing central government of neglect of the region.
Darfur’s rebel Sudan Liberation Movement said the government had launched another heavy two-pronged attack in the Jabel Marra region on Friday, trying to gain control over the rebel-held area and derail peace talks in Qatar.
Sudan’s army denied it had attacked rebels in Darfur.
Reuters.