Beheaded Sudan editor is buried

[seriousstan]

Thousands of mourners have attended the funeral of the Sudanese newspaper editor whose beheaded body was found in Khartoum after he was kidnapped.
Many people wept openly as Mohammed Taha's body was carried on a wooden bed from his home to the cemetery.

The BBC's Alfred Taban says the killing has shocked Sudan. Although Mr Taha had criticised many different groups, they are all united in mourning him.

Mr Taha's paper angered Islamists last year and some have been arrested.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/5322818.stm

New York, September 6, 2006—The Committee to Protect Journalists deplores the kidnapping and beheading in Sudan of a newspaper editor. Masked gunmen bundled Mohammed Taha Mohammed Ahmed, editor-in-chief of the private daily Al-Wifaq, into a car outside his home in east Khartoum late Tuesday. Police found his severed head next to his body today in the south of the capital. His hands and feet were bound, according to a CPJ source and news reports.

Mohammed Taha had previously angered Islamists by running an article about the Prophet Muhammad. He had also written critically about the political opposition and armed groups in Sudan’s western Darfur region, according to press reports. No group has claimed responsibility for the killing, Reuters reported.

Mohammed Taha, 50, was an Islamist and former member of the National Islamic Front. But in May last year, he was detained for several days, his paper was closed for three months, and fined 8 million Sudanese pounds (US$3,200), after he offended the country’s powerful Islamists by republishing an article from the Internet that questioned the ancestry of the Prophet Muhammad. Demonstrators outside the courthouse demanded he be sentenced to death for blasphemy. Sudan is religiously conservative and penalizes blasphemy and insulting Islam with the death penalty.

Six-months ago, unidentified assailants set fire to the offices of Al-Wifaq, badly damaging the building. The perpetrators were never identified, a CPJ source said.
http://www.cpj.org/news/2006/mideast/sudan06sept06na.html