|
British teacher 'must pay'
29/11/2007 10:06 - (SA)
Khartoum - Sudan charged a British teacher with inciting religious hatred - a crime punishable by 40 lashes - because she allowed her students to name a teddy bear Muhammad as part of a class project.
The country's top Muslim clerics pressed the government to ensure that the teacher, Gillian Gibbons, was punished, comparing her action to author Salman Rushdie's "blasphemies" against the Prophet Muhammad.
The charges against Gibbons angered the British government, which urgently summoned the Sudanese ambassador to discuss the case. British and American Muslim groups also criticised the decision.
Gibbons, 54, was arrested at her home in Khartoum on Sunday after some parents of her students accused her of naming the bear after Islam's prophet. Muhammad was a common name among Muslim men, but the parents saw applying it to a toy animal as an insult.
Al-Bashir vows to lead holy war
Officials in Sudan's foreign ministry had tried to play down the case, calling it an isolated incident and predicting on Tuesday that Gibbons could be released without charge.
But hard-liners had considerable weight in the government of President Omar al-Bashir, which came to power in a 1989 military coup that touted itself as creating an Islamic state.
The north of the country based its legal code on Islamic Sharia law, and al-Bashir often wanted to burnish his religious credentials.
Last year, he vowed to lead a jihad, or holy war, against the United Nations peacekeepers if they deployed in the Darfur region of western Sudan.
He relented this year to allow a UN-African Union force there - but this month said he would bar Scandinavian peacekeepers from participating because newspapers in their countries ran caricatures of Prophet Muhammad last year.
Streets were calm on Wednesday in Khartoum, but a pickup truck drove through the capital with loudspeakers blaring calls for Muslims to protest on Friday after prayers and not to let their religion be insulted.
Diplomatic dispute
Sudanese Prosecutor-General Salah Eddin Abu Zaid said Gibbons was charged with inciting religious hatred and her case would be referred to courts on Thursday.
If convicted, she faced up to 40 lashes, six months in jail and a fine, said Abdul-Daem Zumrawi, an undersecretary at the Justice Ministry.
The verdict and any sentence were up to "the discretionary power of the judge," he said, according to the state Sudanese News Agency.
The case set up an escalating diplomatic dispute with Britain, Sudan's former colonial ruler.
Michael Ellam, a spokesperson for Prime Minister Gordon Brown, said: "We are surprised and disappointed by this development."
He said Foreign Secretary David Miliband would urgently summon Sudanese Ambassador Omer Mohammed Ahmed Siddig and ask "for the rationale behind the charges and a sense of what the next steps might be".
"We will consider our response in the light of that," Ellam said.
|
News
