DUBAI (AFP) — A group calling itself Ansar al-Tawhid has claimed the New Year's Day murder of a US diplomat in Sudan in a statement posted on a militant website, the SITE Intelligence group said on Friday.
The Ansar al-Tawhid group in Sudan said the January 1 killing of USAID official John Granville, 33, and his driver in Khartoum was in response to attempts to raise the banner of Christianity over Sudan, according to the US-based SITE which monitors Islamist websites.
It did not give further details about the group, whose claim could not be authenticated. But variations of the group's name, which means "Partisans of Oneness (of God)," have been used by Islamist extremists elsewhere.
Officials in Khartoum said on Friday that FBI and other US investigators have arrived to join the probe into the diplomat's killing in a drive-by shooting.
Sudan's foreign ministry has called the attack "an isolated incident which has no political connotations."
"The soldiers of Tawhid carried out an operation of killing the American diplomat and his Sudanese driver who sold his religion for few benefits of life," the online statement said in the translation from the Arabic by SITE.
The statement also asked God to accept the Khartoum operation for "His Cause."
It accused "the global infidels" of attacking the Islamic nation "in collaboration with the people of disagreement and hypocrisy to drive people away from Allah, humiliate men, dishonour the Muslim women and raise the cross over the land of Sudan."
But "the soldiers of Tawhid swore to Allah to defend their religion," it added.
The Sudanese interior ministry has said the diplomatic car was caught up in a fight which broke out as some Sudanese were out on the street celebrating the New Year.
Relations between Sudan and the United States have long been strained, most recently over the near five-year conflict in the western region of Darfur over which Washington has accused Khartoum of genocide.
But the US State Department said on Friday that FBI agents received promises of cooperation from the Sudanese authorities as they began work in Khartoum to help probe Granville's murder.
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