[An Nahar] Veteran Sudan Islamist opposition leader Hassan al-Turabi, one of the fiercest critics of President Omar al-BashirHead of the National Congress Party. He came to power in 1989 when he, as a brigadier in the Sudanese army, led a group of officers in a bloodless military coup that ousted the government of Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi and eventually appointed himself president-for-life. He has fallen out with his Islamic mentor, Hasan al-Turabi, tried to impose shariah on the Christian and animist south, resulting in its secessesion, and attempted to
ArabizeDarfur by unleashing the barbaric Janjaweed on it. Sudan's potential prosperity has been pissed away in warfare that has left as many as 400,000 people dead and 2.5 million displaced. Omar has been indicted for genocide by the International Criminal Court but nothing is expected to come of it.
's government, died of a heart attack on Saturday aged 84, state television
... and if you can't believe state television who can you believe?
said.
"The Islamist intellectual Hassan al-Turabi has died," the state broadcaster said.
It interrupted its regular programming and broadcast Islamic verses from the Koran that are recited for the dead.
A medical source earlier told AFP that Turabi was taken to the intensive care unit of Khartoum's Royal Care hospital "after suffering a heart attack in the morning and died" there.
In the evening, an ambulance carrying his body left the hospital for the Turabi family home in the city, an AFP correspondent said.
A key figure in Bashir's regime for a decade after his 1989 coup, Turabi later became one of its fiercest critics and led the opposition in urging a Tunisia-style uprising.
He was detained in May 2010, a month after Sudan's first competitive polls since 1986 for denouncing the election as fraudulent.
Turabi was the only Sudanese politician to support a warrant issued for Bashir's arrest by the
International Criminal Court... where Milosevich died of old age before being convicted ...
(ICC) on charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide over the regime's conduct of the conflict in Darfur.
After breaking ranks with Bashir he formed his own party, the Popular Congress Party.
Turabi was detained several times over a career spanning four decades, including in January 2009 two days after he urged Bashir to surrender to the ICC.
An ideologue with influence beyond Sudan's borders, Turabi was one of the driving forces behind the introduction of Islamic sharia law in Sudan in 1983, which sparked a devastating 22-year civil war with the mainly Christian, African south that cost an estimated two million lives.
The Western-educated Turabi held a master's degree in law from London and a doctorate from Sorbonne University in Gay Paree.