Teacher Hidden As Sudan Mob Urges Death

Ali Mohamed Ajab a lawyer with Khartoum Human rights monitoring group talks to journalists in Khartoum, Sudan, Thursday, Nov 29, 2007 shortly after British teacher Gillian Gibbons has been convicted of inciting religious hatred for letting her pupils name a teddy bear Muhammad. Gibbons was sentenced to 15 days in prison and deportation from Sudan, Thursday. (AP Photos/Abd Raouf) (Abd Raouf - AP)

She pointed to nationalistic songs often played on state media, including one that proclaims, "For you America, we were trained and for you prophet, we were armed."

Gibbons' defense lawyer, al-Gizouli, said that given the strong religious feeling in Sudan, "if you tell the people that someone has done such and such, they get angry ... without (finding out) what exactly happened, the facts, the reality."

By prosecuting Gibbons, the government may have wanted to raise public anger to bolster its resistance to including Western peacekeepers in the United Nations-African Union peacekeeping force that is supposed to deploy in Darfur, al-Gizouli said.

"You take an event like this teacher incident, enlarge it and make a bomb out of it," he told AP. The aim is to show "Muslims in Sudan don't want these people (Westerners) to interfere, we want African troops."

Al-Bashir said in early November that he would not allow Scandinavian countries to join the peacekeeping force because newspapers there published the cartoons that insulted the Prophet Muhammad.

But he long resisted any U.N. peacekeepers, denouncing them as colonialists and vowing to lead a holy war against them, until he consented under growing international pressure to allow the joint force earlier this year.

On Tuesday, the U.N. peacekeeping chief, Jean-Marie Guehenno, said the Khartoum regime was still throwing up obstacles to the deployment of the 26,000-strong force.

Al-Bashir came to power in a 1989 military coup, supported by fundamentalists rooted in the Muslim Brotherhood. His ruling party, dominated by Islamic hard-liners, controls the levers of power in the north, where Islamic Sharia law is in place.

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Associated Press writers Paul Schemm and Lee Keath in Cairo contributed to this report.