First Blood

Flood Blood

A year ago when Lieut. General Ibrahim Abboud, 59, seized the premiership of the Sudan at the head of a military junta, he did not indulge in the Middle East's usual inaugural blood bath. Leaders of the old regime were neither jailed nor harmed. Two former Prime Ministers even got liberal pensions.

Last March a mutiny broke out. Two Sudanese brigadier generals marched on Khartoum with two battalions and kidnaped Abboud's No. 2 man, the Minister of the Interior. But Abboud, after hearing out the brigadiers' complaints, fired his Interior Minister and promoted the two officers to seats on Sudan's Supreme Military Council. Two months later the mutineers organized another inept coup, and though a court-martial sentenced them to death, Abboud commuted their sentences to life imprisonment.

Last month another mutineer, Lieut. Colonel AH Hamid, decided that destiny awaited him, and drove with his band into the Omdurman infantry barracks crying: "Here is the great officer Ali Hamid." This time President Abboud's patience was at an end. Last week Ali Hamid and four of his accomplices were hanged at Khartoum prison--the first casualties, after one year and 15 days, of the Middle East's gentlest revolution.

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