March 24 (Bloomberg) -- A Sudanese aid worker for a Canadian charity was killed yesterday in the western region of Darfur by unidentified gunmen who demanded his satellite phone, his employer said.

“They shot him in front of his family,” Mark Simmons, the Sudan director for Fellowship for African Relief, said in a telephone interview from Khartoum, the capital. “He died on the spot.”

Adam Khatir, 39, ran agricultural programs for the organization in the village of Kongo-Haraza in western Darfur along the border with Chad, Simmons said. “It’s a very tense area at the moment,” he said.

Simmons said he didn’t know if the murder was linked to Sudan’s decision to expel 13 foreign non-governmental organizations following the March 4 indictment of President Umar al-Bashir for alleged war crimes in Darfur by the International Criminal Court.

“It’s hard to know whether it’s related to very negative media reports about NGOs in Sudan recently or just a sign of growing insecurity and increased presence of Chadian opposition groups in the area,” he said.

The gunmen first ambushed Khatir on March 21 while he was in his vehicle on his way home, Simmons said. The assailants beat him because he didn’t have a satellite phone to give them, Simmons said.

Satellite Phone

“They discovered where he lives and went to his home last night” at 9:00 p.m., Simmons said. They asked again for a satellite phone and when he said he didn’t have one, they shot him. Khatir was married with four children, Simmons said.

Four aid workers with Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders, were taken hostage on March 11 and held for three days in northern Darfur by gunmen, later identified by the government as a group calling itself Bashir’s Eagles.

The United Nations-led peacekeeping mission in Darfur, or Unamid, has also reported a series of ambushes and car-jackings, including the killing of one peacekeeper, in the weeks following the ICC decision.

The ICC charged al-Bashir with masterminding a plan to kill, rape and rob civilians in Darfur as part of the counter- insurgency campaign against rebels who took up arms against the government in 2003 to seek greater economic and political power.

Before the expulsions of the relief agencies, Darfur was home to the world’s largest humanitarian operation, serving 4.7 million people, including 2.7 million who fled their homes and now live in camps for the displaced.

Al-Bashir announced on March 16 that Sudan would nationalize all humanitarian work in the country within one year to rid Sudan of “spies” and “thieves.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Heba Aly in Cairo, via the Johannesburg newsroom at haly@bloomberg.net;

Last Updated: March 24, 2009 08:36 EDT