By Ellen Knickmeyer
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, January 2, 2008

CAIRO, Jan. 1 -- Gunmen fired on a car carrying a U.S. diplomat home from a New Year's Eve party in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, early Tuesday, fatally wounding the American and his Sudanese driver.

U.S. officials said it was too early to determine whether the attack was a political killing, coming the day after the formal activation in Sudan's troubled Darfur region of a U.N.-African Union peacekeeping force that is opposed by Islamic extremists. Sudanese authorities called the killings an isolated criminal attack.

The U.S. diplomat worked with the U.S. Agency for International Development, according to Walter Braunohler, the U.S. Embassy spokesman in Khartoum. Braunohler declined to give the diplomat's name, but USAID identified him as John Granville, 33, and the driver as Abdelrahman Abbas Rahama, 39, according to the Reuters news agency.

News agencies quoted the Sudanese Interior Ministry as saying gunmen in another car fired on the American's vehicle. The driver died immediately or soon after the shooting. The diplomat died Tuesday afternoon while receiving medical treatment in Khartoum, Braunohler said.

Alfred Taban, editor of the independent Khartoum Monitor newspaper, said the American was returning home in his official vehicle from a New Year's Eve party hosted by the British Embassy. The attack took place near the diplomat's home, Taban said. The Sudanese Foreign Ministry said the time was about 4 a.m.

U.S. and Sudanese officials said they were investigating the incident. Braunohler declined to give further details of the shooting, or to say whether the embassy had received increased threats before the killings or had heightened security after.

The Sudan Media Center, which is linked to the Sudanese government, cited an unidentified government official as saying the attack was criminal in motive and that there was "no grain of suspicion of an organized terrorist action."

The country's western Darfur region is the scene of a nearly five-year conflict in which fighters allied with the Khartoum government are accused of razing hundreds of villages and killing hundreds of thousands of villagers through violence, disease and hunger.

Sudan's president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, long resisted U.S. and other international pressure for deployment of a U.N. force in Darfur. Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants, in messages released from the al-Qaeda figures' hiding places, have promised attacks against any U.N. peacekeepers who set foot in Darfur.

But this summer, Bashir agreed to allow a joint peacekeeping force of the United Nations and African Union.

The United Nations formally began its Darfur peacekeeping responsibilities Monday. Also Monday, President Bush signed legislation that allows local governments in the United States to prohibit the investment of public funds in companies that do business with Sudan.

The deployment has heightened tensions in Khartoum, Taban said. "The military considers the U.N. part of the U.S. . . . so their anger has been directed against the Americans," Taban said.

"There are people who are very close to the government who are really not happy with this U.N. thing," he said.