ICC Note:

Faiza Abdalla, 37, has been charged with adultery for marrying a South Sudanese Catholic and apostasy for allegedly leaving Islam. According to sources on the ground, Abdalla was arrested and detained by Sudanese law enforcement on April 2nd when apply for her national identification card. According to reports, officers were disturbed by her professed Christianity despite her Islamic surname. Accusing her of apostasy, though she was raised a Christian in the Nuba mountains, the officers arrested Abdallah. Her husband fled the country two years ago to escape persecution.

05/28/2014 Sudan (Morning Star News) – In the town of El Gadarif on Sudan’s eastern border with Ethiopia, another Christian woman has been incarcerated under suspicion of having left Islam, Morning Star News has learned.

Immigration/Citizenship police questioned Faiza Abdalla, 37, as she was going to obtain her national identification number at an official building in El Gadarif on April 2, a source told Morning Star News. When she responded to officers’ questions about her religion that she was a Christian, they immediately arrested her based on her Muslim name, he said.

Her family had converted to Christianity from Islam before she was born but kept their former name, the source said.

“They arrested me because I am a Christian,” said Abdalla, originally from an area in Sudan’s Nuba Mountains, where her parents raised her in an evangelical church.

As happened with Ibrahim and Wani, a court on April 8 terminated Abdalla’s marriage to her husband, a lifelong Catholic from South Sudan, on grounds that she had committed “adultery” by allegedly having left Islam and married a Christian. Abdalla’s husband fled the country two years ago because of persecution.

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