SUDAN TO EXECUTE ISLAMISTS FOR KILLING US ENVOY

A Khartoum court condemned four Islamists to death for the 2008 killing of a US diplomat and his Sudanese driver. Judge Said Ahmed al-Badri sentenced the four to be hanged for the murders. The prosecution said defendants Mohamed Makkawi Ibrahim Mohamed and Abdel Basit al-Hajj Hassan fired the shots that killed driver Abdelrahman Abbas Rahama, 39, and John Granville, 33. Mohamed Osman Yusuf Mohamed, a former army officer, was allegedly the driver of the attackers'
vehicle, while Abdel Raouf Abu Zaid Mohamed was a passenger. Granville, who worked for the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and his 40-year-old Sudanese driver Abbas were shot dead in their car in Khartoum on January 1, 2008. 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.