Political secretary of the Sudanese Congress Party’s flogged

The political secretary of the Sudanese Congress Party and two other party members today received 20 lashes in front of the Omdurman Criminal Court.

Mastour Ahmed Mohamed was flogged, together with two other prominent party members, immediately after having been convicted of disturbing the public order.

Mohamed, Asem Mohamed El Tayeb, and Ibrahim Mohamed Zein were detained on 28 April at Soug Libya in western Omdurman, where they criticised the policies of the ruling National Congress Party in public.

The National Consensus Forces (NCF, a coalition of opposition parties) denounced the “unjust sentence”. NCF spokesman Abubakar Yousef told Radio Dabanga that “speaking in public lies at the heart of civil actions by the opposition forces, and they have the right to do so.

“The judge, however, denied them this right, and convicted them, without the presence of a defence lawyer, to 20 lashes, to be carried out immediately.”

Yousef added that this “unfair procedure shows that the Khartoum regime has returned to its practices of the nineteen nineties by exploiting the judiciary in its fight against politicians of the opposition”.