Khartoum, Sudan, Nov 27, 2007 / 09:06 am
A teacher from England was thrown into a Sudanese jail on Monday after being arrested for insulting the Prophet Muhammed when she named a classroom teddy bear after a student named Muhammed, CNN/Time reports.
Gillian Gibbons, 54, had only recently arrived in the Sudanese capital Khartoum to teach at Unity High School, an exclusive British-run school organized on Christian principles. Assigned to teach six and seven-year-olds, she asked them as a classroom project to dress up and name a teddy bear and keep a diary of his outings.
Debating what to name the bear, the children considered the names Hassan and Abdullah but overwhelmingly voted for Muhammed, the first name of the most popular boy in the class.
The naming of the bear didn’t raise much concern at first, but last week, parents from another class raised concerns with the school. On Sunday Sudanese police came to the school, where Miss Gibbons lives, and jailed her on blasphemy charges. The Sharia law was introduced to Sudan in 1991.