Al Yurae- The Anti-Corruption Criminal Court in Khartoum yesterday, headed by Judge Al-Moez Babiker Al-Jazouli, fined the wife of former President Omar Al-Bashir, Wedad Babiker, 100 billion Sudanese pounds, ($136000) after convicting her of dishonestly acquired illegal wealth, and also ruled to confiscate funds, real estate, property and bank accounts owned by her.
In December 2019, the Sudanese authorities arrested al-Bashir’s wife to investigate reports related to the acquisition of land and residential properties and issued a decision at the time to seize all her properties and the property of her children and ban her from traveling. The Public Prosecution had filed a complaint against Wedad Babiker for violating the text of Article (7) of the Law on Combating Suspicious Illicit Wealth of 1989, amended 1996, and the court heard 5 prosecution witnesses and 15 defense witnesses.
The court convicted Wedad Babiker of violating the provisions of Articles 6 and 7 of the Law on Combating Illicit Wealth.
The court ordered the confiscation of 11 residential plots of land in different neighborhoods in Khartoum, in addition to agricultural land in the “Al-Slate” and “Kadro” projects in the city of Bahri.
The court noted that the defendant had been collecting retirement pensions of her late husband, armed forces officer Ibrahim Shams al-Din, for more than 16 years after his death, and even after her marriage to President al-Bashir. According to the judge, the SAF Pension Act forfeits the entitlement from the wife of the deceased once she marries another person, as well as from his children after marriage.
Al-Bashir married Wedad Babiker after the death of her husband, Colonel Ibrahim Shams al-Din, who was a minister of state in the Ministry of Defense and one of the most prominent leaders of the 1989 coup, in a military plane crash in 2001 in the Adariel area of South Kordofan state on the border with South Sudan.
The Committee for the Dismantling and Liquidation of the Ousted President’s Regime had confiscated from the defendant Wedad Babiker and her sons dozens of residential lands in upscale neighborhoods in Khartoum. In December 2019, al-Bashir was convicted of two years in prison on charges of illicit enrichment, illegal dealing in foreign currency, and confiscating funds in his possession, and served his sentence in Kober Central Prison in the capital, Khartoum. Bashir is still in court on other charges, most notably undermining the constitutional order when he staged his coup in June 1989 against an elected democratic government headed by Umma Party leader Sadiq al-Mahdi. Bashir admitted in court last December that he was fully responsible for orchestrating and executing the 1989 coup, but the verdict has yet to be issued.
