The secretary general of the Sudanese Journalists Union Salah Omer Alshaikh, who is also the director of a Sudanese company, SodaExpo, was sued on Tuesday for shaking the hand of the Israeli ambassador to Eritrea, the Sudan Tribune reported.
Alshaikh greeted the Israeli ambassador, Elie Antebi, last week, at an industrial exhibition in Asmara, the capital city of Eritrea. Alshaikh was showing Sudanese products at the exhibition.
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The incident took on scandalous proportions after a member of the journalists secretariat Abdelmajed Abdelhamid asked Alshaikh to explain why he had done such a despicable thing as shaking hands with an Israeli diplomat.
Alshaikh responded that this was a lie, and that he had properly ignored the Israeli ambassador when he visited the Sudanese booth.
The head of the journalists union, Sadiq Rizaik, supported Alshaikh, minimizing the extent of the incident.
Nevertheless, on Tuesday, Abdelhamid lodged a complaint against Alshaikh, accusing the secretary-general of failing to separate his union job and his commercial interests.
According to the Sudan Tribune, it is not yet clear on which legal foundation he based his claim.
Sudan has no diplomatic relations with Israel and remains hostile to the Jewish state on the grounds that it is occupying Arab territories.
The Tribune mentioned a report released in September 2014 by Human Rights Watch, which said that Sudanese asylum seekers who returned to Sudan from Israel “were held for long periods – one was tortured, one put in solitary confinement, and a third charged with treason.”
No idea what they do to Sudanese who shake hands with Zionists.
