Sudan frees man convicted of 2008 killing of USAID worker

KHARTOUM — Sudanese authorities released on Monday a man sentenced to death over the 2008 assassination in Khartoum of an American development worker, the felon’s lawyer said.

The court’s decision to free Abdelraouf Abu Zaid forms part of a 2020 compensation package deal between Khartoum and Washington, the lawyer added.

Islamist gunmen shot dead John Granville, a 33-year-old US Agency for International Development employee, along with his 40-year-old Sudanese driver Abdel Rahman Abbas in a hail of bullets on New Year’s Day 2008.

His killing aggravated already-strained relations between Sudan and the United States under the northeast African country’s ex-president Omar Al Bashir, who hosted former Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden in 1992-1996.

Defence lawyer Adel Abdelghani told AFP that Abu Zaid’s release from Khartoum’s Kober prison followed “a letter from the high court”.

Abdelghani said his client is now aged in his mid-30s.

Along with three accomplices, Abu Zaid was sentenced to capital punishment in 2009 but the four inmates escaped prison a year later.

He was later recaptured, with two of the group believed to have been subsequently killed in Somalia, and one of the escapees thought to still be at large.

Sudan’s December 2020 agreement with Washington removed it from 27 years of crippling sanctions, as the country of 45 million inhabitants was blacklisted as a state sponsor of terror.

As part of the deal brokered by then-premier Abdalla Hamdok, Khartoum paid $335 million to American survivors and families of victims killed in past attacks.

Hamdok, who led a short-lived transitional government installed following Bashir’s 2019 ouster, sought to bolster ties with Washington and end Sudan’s pariah status.

The package also provided compensation for families of victims of Al Qaeda’s 2000 attack on the USS Cole off Yemen’s coast and the 1998 US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

Relations between the countries have since eased, with John Godfrey last year taking up the post of US ambassador to Sudan, the first in nearly 25 years.

Washington however continues to withhold $700 million in aid earmarked for the cash-strapped country, in response to a 2021 military coup that derailed the post-Bashir transition to civilian rule.