Convicted of Darfur atrocities within the 2000s, Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-Al-Rahman claims he’s a sufferer of mistaken identification.
Printed On 18 Nov 2025
Prosecutors have known as for a life sentence for a Sudanese militia chief convicted of committing crimes towards humanity through the East African nation’s earlier civil conflict greater than twenty years in the past.
The Worldwide Legal Court docket (ICC) opened a sentencing listening to for Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-Al-Rahman (also referred to as Ali Kushayb) on Tuesday.
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Yesterday, prosecutor Julian Nicholls had demanded the utmost penalty for the “enthusiastic, energetic and efficient perpetrator of abuses carried out within the western Darfur area”.
Prosecutors say that amongst his crimes, Abd-Al-Rahman killed two folks with an axe.
“You actually have an axe assassin earlier than you,” Nicholls informed the judges in The Hague, as Abd-Al-Rahman seemed on. “Solely a life sentence will serve the curiosity of retribution and deterrence.”
Abd-Al-Rahman’s defence legal professionals, who’re asking for a seven-year jail time period, will current their case throughout Tuesday and Wednesday’s hearings.
Final month, Abd-Al-Rahman was convicted of 27 counts, together with mass murders and rapes, for main government-backed Janjaweed militia forces within the Darfur area in western Sudan on a marketing campaign of killing and destruction from 2003 to 2004.
It was the primary time the ICC had convicted a suspect of crimes in Darfur, a area that’s as soon as once more seeing mass atrocities amid a vicious civil war.
Incorrect man
Abd-Al-Rahman has persistently denied being a high-ranking official within the Janjaweed militia, a largely Arab paramilitary power armed by the Sudanese authorities to kill primarily Black African tribes in Darfur.
He has insisted for the reason that opening of his trial in April 2022 that he’s “not Ali Kushayb” and that the court docket has received the flawed man – an argument rejected by the judges.
Abd-Al-Rahman fled to the Central African Republic in February 2020 when a brand new Sudanese authorities introduced its intention to cooperate with the ICC’s investigation.
He stated he then handed himself in as a result of he was “determined” and feared authorities would kill him.
Preventing broke out in Sudan’s Darfur area when non-Arab tribes, complaining of systematic discrimination, took up arms towards the Arab-dominated authorities.
Khartoum responded by unleashing the Janjaweed, a power now generally known as the In style Defence Forces and drawn from among the many area’s nomadic tribes.
The United Nations says 300,000 folks had been killed and a couple of.5 million extra had been displaced within the Darfur battle within the 2000s.
ICC prosecutors are hoping to challenge extra arrest warrants associated to the present disaster in Sudan.
Tens of 1000’s have been killed and hundreds of thousands displaced within the conflict between the government-linked Sudanese military and the paramilitary Fast Assist Forces (RSF), which traces its origins again to the Janjaweed militia.
The battle, marked by claims of atrocities on all sides, has created the “worst humanitarian crisis in the world”, based on the African Union.
No less than 40,000 folks have been killed, based on the World Well being Group, and 12 million others displaced.
