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Sudan briefly detained its leading fundamentalist Islamic ideologue on Monday, accusing him of aiding a Darfur rebel attack on the capital but then releasing him without charge, according to his party and state media.

Hassan Turabi was arrested after dawn at his home in Khartoum and at least 10 other members of his Popular Congress Party members were detained in a government sweep across the city, said Awadh Ba Bakr, a relative and close aide to Turabi. Bakr says al-Turabi was questioned by security and released without charges about 15 hours later.

Turabi is believed to wield influence with Khalil Ibrahim, the leader of the Justice and Equality Movement, whose fighters launched an unprecedented attack Saturday near Khartoum, hundreds of miles from their bases in the country's far west.

The attack was the closest Darfur rebels have ever come to the seat of Sudan's government, which they accuse of marginalizing ethnic African minorities and worsening the area's humanitarian crisis.

Sudan's official news agency quoted unidentified government officials as saying that rebels already in custody implicated Turabi and other party members as part of a "conspiracy." Interrogations were underway, it said.

Turabi, who has a doctorate from the Sorbonne, is one of the founders of Islamist politics in Sudan and provided the ideological basis for President Omar al-Bashir's coup and the creation of an Islamic state in 1989.

Both he and Ibrahim were once part of the regime, and as fellow Islamists, ideological allies.

Ibrahim, however, denounced the Sudanese government in 1999 for its Arab bias against ethnic Africans and resigned from the government and eventually taking up arms.

Ibrahim maintained he and Turabi, an ethnic Arab with a Darfuri wife, still had their differences.

During the early 1990s, Sudan was accused of sheltering Islamic militant groups; Osama bin Laden made his home here until the government threw him out in 1996. Turabi backed Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War, a move that helped make Sudan a pariah state.

Turabi fell out with al-Bashir in 1999 and has since been in and out of prison on various charges, and under house arrest. He was never sentenced, and remains influential.