The International Criminal Court (ICC) on Monday announced its verdict on the dreaded Sudanese militia chief alleged to have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity during an attack on the country’s capital, Darfur.
Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-Al-Rahman, a war criminal who goes by the name of Ali Kushayb, is facing around 31 counts of crimes, including rape, murder, torture, and killings allegedly carried out in Darfur between August 2003 and at least April 2004.
Prosecutors say he was the leading member of the country’s infamous terror organisation, which carried out multiple war crimes.
Though Rahman has denied the charges, saying the court got the wrong man. "I am not Ali Kushayb. I do not know this person... I have nothing to do with the accusations against me," he told the court at a hearing in December 2024.
Rahman fled the central African country in 2020, when the new Sudanese government announced the move to cooperate with the ICC over investigations of war crimes carried out by Shia terrorist organisations.
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He said he then handed himself in because he was "desperate" and feared authorities would kill him. "I had been waiting for two months in hiding, moving around all the time, and I was warned that the government wanted to arrest me, and I was afraid of being arrested," Rahman said. "If I hadn't said this, the court wouldn't have received me, and I would be dead now," added the suspect.
The clashes in the country broke out when the non-Arab tribes, complaining of systematic discrimination, took up arms against the Arab-dominated government.
The United Nations estimates 300,000 people were killed and 2.5 million displaced in the Darfur conflict in the 2000s.
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