(RTTNews) - The judges at the international Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, Netherlands, on Monday dropped war crime charges pressed against Sudanese rebel leader Bahar Idriss Abu Garda, on the grounds that the prosecution had failed to produce enough evidence to proceed with a trial against the rebel leader.

"The chamber declines to confirm the charges against Mr Abu Garda," the three-member judge panel at the ICC said in a statement released Monday. The judges based their ruling on a two-week pretrial hearing held in October.

Though the judges said that they were "not satisfied" there was sufficient evidence to prosecute Abu Garda for either direct or indirect involvement in the attack, they added that the trial would be reopened if the prosecutors succeed in producing more evidence against the rebel leader.

Earlier, Abu Garda faced three charges in connection with a 2007 attack on an African Union peacekeeping mission that left 12 international troops dead. He was accused of planning and participating in the attack, which occurred on 29th September 2007 in Umm Kadada in North Darfur.

During a pre-trial hearing held last year, Garda had denied any involvement in the 2007 attack that prompted the AU to suspend its peacekeeping mission on Darfur. He insisted that he had condemned the attack at that time, pointing out that it served only the interests of the Sudanese government in Khartoum.

The development came just a week after the ICC ruled that the genocide charges against Sudanese President Omar al Bashir could be resubmitted, overruling an earlier ruling that cited insufficient evidence to prosecute al-Bashir for allegedly carrying out ethnic cleansing against the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa groups.

Striking down the earlier order following a review petition by prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo, presiding judge Erkki Kourula ruled last Wednesday that ICC's pre-trial chamber would hold a fresh hearing in the case to decide whether or not to add genocide to the list of charges currently in place against the Sudanese leader.

The latest ruling came follows ICC prosecutors appeal against the tribunal's earlier decision not to indict al-Bashir on genocide charges, insisting that they now have enough evidence to show al-Bashir mobilized his entire government machinery to destroy a substantial part of three Darfur ethnic groups--Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa--over a period of six years.

Though the judges at the ICC said in March that there was insufficient evidence to support the genocide charges, they issued a warrant for Bashir's arrest on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity for allegedly orchestrating a campaign of murder, torture, rape and forced expulsions in Darfur. It marked the first such action against a sitting head of state.

Despite persistent efforts by ICC Chief Prosecutor Moreno-Ocampo, the African Union has refused to cooperate with the ICC in arresting and extraditing al-Bashir, who has already defied the ICC warrant by traveling to several African countries.

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