KHARTOUM, February 11 - RAPSI. Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir has pardoned Mubarak Mustafa, who was serving time for helping four men convicted of killing a US diplomat escape from jail.

The Sudan Gazette quotes lawyer Abu Bakr Abdel-Razik as saying that his client Mubarak Mustafa was released last week after being granted amnesty from the president.

John Granville from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and his driver Abdurrahman Abbas Rahma were gunned down on New Year's Eve in 2008. The Sudanese authorities arrested five men from Ansar al-Tawhid Islamic militant group whom they suspected of the crime. In 2009, four of these men were convicted and sentenced to death by hanging, but managed to break out of the maximum-security Kober prison in Khartoum a year later. The Sudanese government said the prisoners escaped through the prison's sewers.

The United States called on the Sudanese government to "initiate a thorough investigation of the circumstances surrounding this escape" and "to prosecute, to the full extent of the law, any individuals or groups found complicit in the escape of these criminals".

It was later reported that one of the fugitives was killed in Somalia, while another was caught and re-arrested.