A senior member of the Sudanese government accused of supporting ethnic cleansing in Darfur has been allowed into Britain for medical treatment twice in the last six months, Scotland on Sunday can reveal. While Tony Blair and fellow international leaders have condemned the Khartoum government for complicity in looming genocide in Darfur, its intelligence chief General Salah Abdallah has been granted two visas to enter the UK for "urgent" treatment at an exclusive private hospital in London. Between 1990 and 1996 Abdallah, also known as Al Ghosh, was Osama Bin Laden's main escort when he lived in Sudan. Since 2003, he has organised and carried out the brutal counter-insurgency operation in Darfur, where hundreds of thousands of African Sudanese have been killed by marauding Janjaweed militia. He is one of the Sudanese leaders singled out for condemnation by human rights groups and the United Nations.
But Washington has also courted Abdallah for his inside knowledge of al-Qaeda. American politicians and pressure groups reacted with fury last year after it emerged the CIA had secretly flown him to Washington for high-level meetings on sharing intelligence in the war on terror.