Global media is widely reporting the arrest of Muslim Brotherhood leader Hassan Turabi by the Sudanese government who accusing him of helping a Darfur rebel attack on the Sudanese capital. According to the Associated Press:
Sudan arrested its leading fundamentalist Islamic ideologue on Monday, accusing him of aiding a Darfur rebel attack on the capital, according to his party and state media. Hassan Turabi was arrested after dawn at his home in Khartoum and at least 10 other members of his Popular Congress Party members were detained in a government sweep across the city, said Awadh Ba Bakr, a relative and close aide to Turabi. Turabi is believed to wield influence with Khalil Ibrahim, the leader of the Justice and Equality Movement, whose fighters launched an unprecedented attack Saturday near Khartoum, hundreds of miles from their bases in the country’s far west. The attack was the closest Darfur rebels have ever come to the seat of Sudan’s government, which they accuse of marginalizing ethnic African minorities and worsening the area’s humanitarian crisis. Sudan’s official news agency quoted unidentified government officials as saying that rebels already in custody implicated Turabi and other party members as part of a “conspiracy.” Interrogations were underway, it said.
Turabi is probably best known as the man who invited Osama bin Laden to live in Khartoum during the 1990s when Sudan was both a center for terrorist activity and strongly under the influence of Turabi.
Although Turabi himself does not appear to be currently active in the global Muslim Brotherhood, Doctor Isam El-Bashir is a former Minister of Religious Affairs in the Islamic National Front (NIF), Turabi’s Sudanese political party, and a member of the Sudanese “Transitional National Assembly”, composed primarily of members of the NIF. As previous posts have reported, Dr. Basheer (aka Issam El-Bashir) has held numerous positions associated with the global Muslim Brotherhood including as a former director of the UK charity Islamic Relief and a member of the European Council for Fatwa and Research. He currently heads the Center for Moderation in Kuwait which is also associated with the global Muslim Brotherhood.
The BBC has published a profile of Turabi which can be found here.
A history of the Muslim Brotherhood in Sudan can be found here
