The $10-Million Hunt for U.S. Diplomat Killers Is On

Two men, now designated by the State Department as terrorists, escaped from a prison in Kober, Sudan, but were never found.

Today Secretary of State Hillary Clinton classified two Sudanese men — Abdelbasit Alhaj Alhassan Haj Hamad and Mohamed Makawi Ibrahim Mohamed — as terrorists, and the Obama administration offered $10 million for information leading to their capture. The men were convicted in 2009 for the January 2008 murders, in Khartoum, Sudan, of a 33-year-old U.S. diplomat named John Granville and a USAID employee Granville was working with, but the suspects somehow escaped in 2010 from a prison in Kober, Sudan, via the prison's (apparently insecure) sewage system. (They were never recovered by Sudan authorities.)

Granville's death, the subsequent escape of his killers, and now the Obama administration's reward for their detention poses a great challenge to a long-held wish of the Sudanese government: to be removed from the U.S.'s official list of countries that sponsor terrorism. Sudan has occupied a spot on the list since 1993.