Sudanese security agents beat up lawyers in Khartoum

Agents of the National Intelligence and Security Service (NISS) assaulted a number of lawyers in front of the Khartoum North Criminal Court, during a trial session of opposition leaders Faroug Abu Eisa and Dr Amin Mekki Madani, on Monday.

Lawyer Wagas Omar told Radio Dabanga that he and his colleagues Suheir Sa'eed, Manazil Omar, and Jamal Abu Sheiba were seized by security agents, when they were holding a sit-in in protest against the detention of senior lawyers Abu Eisa and Madani.

Both were charged by the NISS of instigating violence against the state and violating the Constitution, after they had signed the Sudan Appeal, a political communiqué calling for regime-change, together with the Sudan Revolutionary Front, and the National Umma Party, in Addis Ababa on 3 December last year.

Omar said that the security agents severely beat and humiliated him and his fellow lawyers, after which they were thrown into a lorry. “They took us to a courtyard, called The Grave, where we were interrogated and beaten again. My female colleague Suheir Saeed and I were robbed of our money, before we were released nine hours later.”

Charges

Another lawyer, Mohamed Ibrahim, will file charges against NISS officers for physically and verbally abusing him.

While protesting in front of the Khartoum North court on Monday, security agents stopped him, calling him “Abu Rous, agent of the Russians and the Americans”. When he denied being the man, they claimed they had seen him drinking alcohol at the American Embassy.

When Ibrahim said he was a lawyer and asked them about an arrest warrant, one of them produced an identity card, stating he was a sergeant. The agents then started to beat him, forcing to embark an Atos vehicle, and continued beating, insulting, and threatening to rape him while the vehicle moved towards Khartoum. 

The vehicle stopped in front of a one-story building in El Amarat, Street 57, where a senior officer intervened, apologised, and allowed him to leave.

Ibrahim immediately went to a police station to obtain a copy of Form 8*, and proceeded to a hospital, where a doctor confirmed injuries at his left hand and eye, and bruises on his face and back, but abstained from filling in the form.

The lawyer stressed in a statement on Tuesday that he would make use of “all legal ways” to ensure the conviction of the assailants. He has notified the Sudanese Lawyers Bar about the assault, and will lodge a formal complaint against the NISS.

According to the activist news site Alrakuba, the NISS officers mistakenly took Ibrahim for a human rights lawyer called Khaled “Abu Rous”, who disappeared more than a year ago.

* In Sudan, medical evidence of an assault is admitted solely via the so-called Form 8. It can be issued only by police stations, or approved hospitals and clinics. Critics state that Form 8 is “glaringly inadequate”, as sufficient medical evidence is often very difficult to obtain.