American activist from South Sudan accused of attempting coup back home

A top educated person from South Sudan who now lives in the United States has been accused in Arizona, along with a man from Utah, of planning to buy and send lots of weapons to overthrow the government in South Sudan.

Peter Biar Ajak ran away to the United States with the help of the American government, four years ago after he said South Sudan’s president wanted to kidnap or kill him. Ajak, who is now 40 years old, and his family were given special visas quickly because they had been hiding in Kenya for several weeks. He lived in Maryland until recently.

A legal document in Arizona says Ajak and Abraham Chol Keech, who are 44 and from Utah, are accused of plotting to buy and send weapons to South Sudan through another country. This breaks the law about exporting weapons. The weapons they were thinking about included guns like AK-47s, grenade launchers, Stinger missiles, hand grenades, sniper rifles, bullets, and other controlled weapons.

The criminal report was made public by the United States. Officials from the justice department still couldn’t find the case on the government’s website by Tuesday afternoon. It was not clear if the men had lawyers who could talk about the accusations against them.

The defendants tried to secretly bring big weapons and bullets from the United States to South Sudan, which is a country controlled by the U. NThe arms embargo is because of the fighting between armed groups that has caused thousands of deaths and people to leave their homes. This was said by Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen from America The Department of Justice’s National Security Division said in a statement.

“Saying no to sending American weapons to other countries helps to make sure they don’t get used to cause trouble in other countries,” Gary Restaino, U.S, lawyer explained in Arizona.

A man who picked up the phone at the Embassy of South Sudan in Washington on Tuesday said that they don’t have a press officer and the ambassador was not available to comment because he was traveling.

From 2022 to 2023, Ajak worked at Harvard University’s Belfer Center as a postdoctoral fellow, where he studied how South Sudan became a country. He was also a member at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies of the National Defense University and a Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy.

South Sudan became its own country on July 9, 2011, after a vote by the people. But many different groups of people are fighting each other and treating each other very badly in the country.