A British primary school teacher arrested in Sudan faces up to 40 lashes for blasphemy after letting her class of 7-year-olds name a teddy bear Muhammad.

Gillian Gibbons, a 54-year-old mother of two from Liverpool, was arrested at her lodgings at Khartoum's Unity High School yesterday, accused of insulting the Prophet of Islam.

Her colleagues said that they feared for her safety after reports that groups of young men had gathered outside the Khartoum police station where she was taken and were shouting death threats.

The Unity school is a Christian-run co-educational private school that teaches both Christians and Muslims and is popular with Sudanese professionals and expatriate workers.

Bishop Ezekiel Kondo, chairman of the school council, told The Times that the school was in dispute with authorities over taxes, and suggested that Ms Gibbons, who arrived in Khartoum in August, may have been caught up in that. "The thing may be very simple but there are people who are trying to make it bigger. It's a kind of blackmail," he said.

Another source at the school blamed another teacher, from a well-connected Khartoum family, who had raised the issue with the headmistress but was rebuffed and decided to complain.

Teachers at the school, in central Khartoum only a mile from the River Nile, said that Ms Gibbons had made an innocent mistake by letting her pupils choose their favourite name for the toy as part of a school project.

Robert Boulos, the Unity director, said that Mrs Gibbons was following a British National Curriculum course designed to teach young pupils about animals and their habitats. This year’s animal was the bear.

In September, she asked a girl to bring in her teddy bear to help the Year 2 class to focus and then asked the class to name the toy.

"They came up with eight names including Abdullah, Hassan and Muhammad. Then she explained what it meant to vote and asked them to choose the name," Mr Boulos said.

Twenty out of the 23 children chose Muhammad. Each child was allowed to take the bear home at weekends and asked to write a diary about what they did with the toy. Each entry was collected in a book with a picture of the bear on the cover, next to the message "My name is Muhammad".

Mr Boulos said that the bear itself was not marked or labelled with the name in any way, he added, saying Sudanese police had now seized the book and had asked to interview the 7-year-old girl.

He said that he had decided to close down the school until January for fear of reprisals in Sudan’s predominantly Muslim capital.

"This is a very sensitive issue. We are very worried about her safety," he said. "This was a completely innocent mistake. Miss Gibbons would have never wanted to insult Islam."

A spokesman for the British Embassy in Khartoum said: "We are in contact with the authorities here and they have visited the teacher and she is in a good condition."

According to the Sudanese Media Centre, which is closely associated with the government, the attorney-general's office had opened proceedings against Ms Gibbons "under article 125 of the criminal law (insult of faith and religions)".

It quoted Mutusim Abdallah, who heads the attorney's office, as saying that she printed the name of the Prophet on the bear. "Then she wrote letters to student guardians telling them that they should receive a doll on which the name Muhammad is printed," he said. "However this event was met with wide condemnation by guardians of the students."

Under Sudan's Sharia law, the punishment for blasphemy is 40 lashes, although the teacher could also be fined or jailed for up to six months.

A spokeswoman for the Gibbons family said that the teacher's two children, who are both in their twenties, did not want to comment and "aggravate the situation over there". Colleagues at the teacher’s former school, Dovecot Primary in Liverpool, also refused to comment, as did Ms Gibbons’s estranged husband Peter, who is also a teacher.

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