Asim Omer Under Torture: The Demise of The State Apparatus in Sudan!

Asim Omer Under Torture: The Demise of The State Apparatus in Sudan!

#SaveAsimOmer

#StopTortureInSudan

Asim Omer is a Sudanese student in University of Khartoum (UoK); the oldest and largest of Sudanese universities, who is also a member of the Sudanese Congress Party of the opposition.

In April 2016, news came out about the intentions of the government to sell the lands of the university -that is situated in the centre of the capital in close proximity to all transportation lines and in a picturesque location on the banks of the Nile - for investment and relocate the campus to a peripheral location in the far south of Khartoum. These news provoked the students. UoK students organised themselves in a committee -replacing the student union that has been absent for years by administrative/political decision from the university management- and strongly opposed these intended directions. Students organized several sit-ins and demonstrations denouncing these intentions. Their efforts succeeded in stopping the selling of the university and its premises. However, the state security apparatus responded in kind.

Sudan National Intelligence and Security Service (NISS) detained number of the students leaders. Some of them were arrested from inside the premises of their lawyer office, whom they were meeting with to discuss the legal options to counter the decision of the university management to dismiss them from studying for their activism in resisting the selling directions. On May 5th, 2016, group of NISS agents stormed the office of Nabil Adib (the Sudanese prominent human rights lawyer) to arrest around 20 students whom were meeting Nabil as their lawyer. Those students spent several weeks in security detention without being charged by anything and without access to any sort of legal aid. Ultimately, NISS released them, and the university retreated their dismissal and the selling intentions were totally denied and backed away of.

Asim Omer was not that lucky.

Asim Omer (who was born in 1994) was arrested by the police while he was in his way outside the university in the second of May 2016. Asim was charged with premeditated murder under Article 130 of the Sudanese Criminal Code. The police said, Asim was seen throwing a vial of Molotov that later caused the death of a member of the riot police.

All this is well and good! It is supposed to be a due legal process, However the story did not end here.

In September 2017, Asim was sentenced to death in violation of the Sudanese Criminal Act itself. The criminal act provides for only in the case of premeditated murder, which contradicts the official story of the police that stated the police officer was killed during a confrontation between students and the police which was not planned for (premeditated) in advance. It also contradicts the fact of the lack of any previous knowledge between Asim and the deceased policeman. This alone precludes planned or premeditated, criminal intent that are required for the death sentencing by the words of the Sudanese Criminal Act.

The trial itself was very shady at best. Beside its lengthy procedures that took over a year, the judge dismissed the prosecutor in the case because he was found feeding answers to one of the witnesses. This scandalous scene was spotted by the defendant himself, when he saw the prosecutor passing pieces of papers to the witness who was on the podium. When Asim notified the judge and the judge ordered the prosecutor to hand over his papers, it was found that the prosecutor was feeding the witness with his testimony and writing him the (model answers) to condemn Asim. These manipulations of procedures and witness tampering were alone enough to dismiss the case. However, the judge decided to stop the session and stopped the trial hearings for months which Asim spent in prison, before coming back to sentence Asim to death penalty in September 2017.

A year later, in August 2018, the High Court in Sudan nullified this sentence and decided to return the case to the court of jurisdiction. However, Asim was not brought by the prison authorities or the police to the first session of the new trial. When his lawyers and family asked to visit him, they found him badly tortured and was put in solitary detention for weeks. He was found suffering from severe injuries resulting of torture that include: loss of hearing in his right ear due to rupture of his eardrum, injuries in his testicles, deep wounds in his arms and legs, inability to swallow or ear, and weakness in the seventh (facial) nerve. These were results of beating with sticks and iron tools by five in-uniform agents! Last week, the prison doctor decided an urgent surgical operation for Asim which was then postponed due severe inflammation that Asim has, according to the doctor's statement.

I personally met Asim in prison during my last political detention. The behaviour of the young man was a model behaviour of a social activist who does not stop public serving. When I saw him in April 2018, he was in the death raw and was leg-cuffed with iron shackles. Nevertheless, he was working to eradicate illiteracy among illiterate prisoners and teaches them to read and write. He found a cause and devoted his time to it in the prison while waiting for the execution of the wrong sentence of death. Asim behaviour was anything but deserving such treatment from the prison authorities.

Asim case is not just a human right case, but it also reveals the total demise of the state apparatus in Sudan. The government ruling party is using Asim and the threat of hanging him as a hostage to pressure his party and opposition in general. They are also using his case as a scarecrow to suppress the student activism movement, flagging with the 30 months Asim spent in prison and the death sentence around his neck to scare student activists and their families. And for this, the judiciary, the police, all state agencies and the las enforcing and preservation agencies lose their supposed neutrality to become mere political tools to serve the political agenda of the ruling party.

The case of Asim Omer reveals the fact that there is no state in Sudan, no law, and nothing at all but the fascist manipulation of these terms by the regime of Omer Al-Bashir.