By Spy Uganda Correspondent
A woman who collected pension funds from a military pension scheme in the name of her husband, for 16 years, even after she married ex-Sudan dictator Omar Al-Bashir, has been convicted by a Sudanese court.
The Sudanese Anti-Corruption Criminal Court convicted Widad Babiker on Sunday for illegally amassing unexplained wealth.
She is the second wife of Sudan’s president Omar Al-Bashir whom he married just a year after her first husband – Ibrahim Shams Al-Din, an ex-army general, died in a plane crash in 2001.
After marrying one of the wealthiest men in Sudan, Babiker continued to draw from her ex-husband’s pension scheme for 16 years.
She allegedly used the money to purchase massive tracks of agricultural land, residential properties and gold artefacts.
But the anti-graft court found her guilty of immersing wealth, which she was stripped of. Additionally, she was fined 100 million Sudanese pounds ($19,197).
While convicting her, the court said that Babiker, believed to be in her 40s, could not convincingly explain how she came to possess a “fortune, properties and precious stones”.
The court froze funds she holds in two accounts at a local bank.
She has two weeks to appeal against the judgement.
Babiker who married Al-Bashir in 2002 told the court that most of her assets were gifts from her husband; only some were bought using the pension money of her late husband.
Her husband – Al-Bashir, is currently facing charges trial for overthrowing a democratically-elected government when he seized power in a 1989 coup.
