Mosque shooting incident leaves 20 dead

On Friday evening, a group of worshippers praying at a mosque in Al-Jarrafah village in Kariri Province, north of Omdurman, were subjected to automatic fire, which killed 20 of them and wounded about 40 others, according to Sudanese television reporting the incident the same evening. The report quoted two eyewitnesses, one of the congregation and a policemen, as saying there had been several attackers. The policeman, Amin Idris Umar, described them as “wearing black caftans and waistcoats”. However, a statement confirming the incident from the official police spokesman, Police Maj-Gen Uthman Ya’qub, quoted by state television on Saturday, said there had been only one attacker. Naming him as Abbas al-Baqir Abbas, the statement said that after the firing commenced, “police surrounded the area, and the culprit exchanged fire with the police, injuring one policeman. The police fired back at the culprit, who had refused to surrender, killing him.” The gunman’s brother had later told the police that Abbas had been a member of the puritanical Takfir wa’l-Hijrah [’Repudiation and Exile’] Islamic sect.

A report carried by the Panafrican News Agency, PANA, also on Saturday, gave the casualty figures as 21 killed and 55 wounded. It quoted Uthman Ya’qub as saying that Abbas, as a member of the Takfir wa’l-Hijrah sect, had been hostile towards the worshippers at the mosque, who belong to the Ansar al-Sunna [’Upholders of Orthodoxy’] sect. According to Uthman, the Ansar al-Sunna “preaches the purging of infidel innovations”, while the Takfir wa’l-Hijrah “considers contemporary Muslim society infidel” and that it “should be brought back to true Islam by force”. PANA reported that the incident was the third of its kind involving members of the two sects since 1996.