Sudan Opposition Leader Hanged for Opposing Use of Islamic Law

The 76-year-old leader of Sudan’s banned Republican Brothers Party, Mahmoud Mohammed Taha, was hanged Friday in a Khartoum prison for opposing application of the sharia-- Islamic law--in Sudan, witnesses said.

They said Taha was executed on a red-painted gallows in Kober Prison in front of about 2,000 people, including four colleagues also sentenced to die. Prison sources said his body was taken by helicopter for burial at an undisclosed place.

Taha was sentenced to death last week by a criminal court for heresy and opposing the sharia, introduced in this country by President Jaafar Numeiri in 1983. An appeals court ruled that the defendants would be allowed a month to repent. But the Sudan News Agency said Numeiri cut the period to three days. The news agency reported Thursday that Numeiri had approved the death sentences against Taha and the four followers.

Individualistic View Taha, who formed the party in the 1940s, established an individualistic interpretation of the Koran, Islam’s holy book, an interpretation regarded as heretical by many Sudanese Muslims. His supporters were mainly students and intellectuals.

In New York, a press freedom organization said the editor of a Sudanese newspaper was among the four facing execution.

Barbara Koeppel, director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, identified him as Abdel Latif Omer Hasaballah, editor of the newspaper Sahafa. She identified the others as Khalid Babikir Hamza, Mohammed Salim Bashir and Tajadin Abdul Raziq.