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Protesters want teacher dead

Thousands in Sudan say the British woman insulted Islam by naming a toy Mohammed.

KHARTOUM, Sudan - Clad in the green of Islam and his hair in dreadlocks, the angry young protester raised a sword over his head and proclaimed the West should know the prophet Mohammed cannot be insulted.

Gillian Gibbons, a British teacher, should be executed for allowing her students to bestow the name Mohammed on a class teddy bear, he said.

"What she did requires her life be taken," Yassin Mubarak said, standing in a crowd of several thousand Sudanese protesting in central Khartoum on Friday against the teacher.

Banners demanded "Punishment, Punishment, Punishment," as protesters chanted, "Kill her! Kill her by firing squad!"

Despite the display of outrage, witnesses said that many of the protesters were government employees who had been ordered to demonstrate and that aside from a large gathering outside the presidential palace, most of Khartoum was quiet.

Gibbons, who was sentenced Thursday to 15 days in jail and deportation, was taken from her prison to a secret location to ensure her safety, said her defense lawyer after he visited her there. She also spoke to her son and daughter back home.

Still, the anger over a teddy bear mystified many in the West.

The answer may lie in the ideology that President Omar al-Bashir's Islamic regime has long instilled in Sudan: a mix of anti-colonialism, religious fundamentalism and a sense that the West is besieging Islam.

While the government does not want to seriously damage ties with Britain, the show of anger underlines its stance that Sudanese oppose Western interference, lawyers and political foes said.

The uproar comes as the United Nations is accusing Sudan of dragging its feet on the deployment of peacekeepers in the war-torn Darfur region.

"You take an event like this teacher incident, enlarge it and make a bomb out of it," Gibbons' lawyer, Kamal al-Gizouli, said. The aim is to show that "Muslims in Sudan don't want these people (Westerners) to interfere, we want African troops."

In their sermons Friday, several Muslim clerics told worshipers that Gibbons had intentionally insulted the prophet but did not call for protests and said the punishment was sufficient.

The protest was far smaller than rallies by tens of thousands of Sudanese that were held with government backing in February 2006 after European newspapers ran caricatures of the prophet Mohammed.

Gibbons was sentenced Thursday to 15 days in jail and deportation for insulting Islam with the naming of the teddy bear, which was part of a class project for her 7-year-old students.

The British government said it was working with Sudan's regime to win her release. Muslim groups in Britain and the United States denounced the ruling, saying Gibbons should not have been tried.

Information from the New York Times was used in this report.

[Last modified December 1, 2007, 01:09:49]