In an interview with Vanguard Newspaper, the Sudanese Ambassador to Nigeria, Dr Tagelsir Mahgoub Ali, spoke on difficulties being faced by his home country to extradite the man suspected to be behind the bombing of Nyanya, near Abuja, the FCT, who fled to Sudan, to Nigeria.
The last time we spoke, the impression we had was that the arrested suspected Nyanya bomber would be extradited to Nigeria. What has happened between then and now?
What has happened is that Sudan of course is ready to meet its obligations but there are some processes which have got to be finalized before the person can be returned to the other country. There is no problem with that because it is just a question of procedures. Once the procedures are finished then the suspect would be handed over to the Nigerian authorities. But it takes time because that is the way it is because there are some processes that have got to be done and these procedures are absolutely important because people are bound by extradition agreement between countries and that agreement is a bit lengthy.
I talked to the concerned authorities in the Ministry of Justice. I talked to the Minister of Justice himself, I talked to the Ministry of Interior, I talked to the security offices in Sudan and I was assured that things are on course. There is no problem. It is a question of time to finalize the processes and to complete the file, so that the person can be turned in to his country.
On how long extradition process normally take, he said “It depends. I don’t know. It is very hard to tell because this is a technical thing that has to do with the authorities there and different parties that play their part in the procedure. And there are so many incidences in contemporary times about people who need to be extradited to other countries and so on. It takes a lot of time.”
Asked whether it is true that the suspect escaped to Sudan for protection and will never be returned to Nigeria, the ambassador replied: “It is not true. Sudan didn’t know about him. And if they had known about him, they wouldn’t have allowed him into the country. Because we understand that he had British passport and he used to use this passport in getting to certain places that he would want to get to. But obviously as soon as the people here asked for him, he was arrested immediately.”
