Abdel Salam Hassan Abdel Salam, who was murdered in London last weekend, was a guiding light of Sudan’s human rights movement.

A poet and lawyer – in that order, he would have said – and an unbowed secularist, he was also an equally committed student of Islam and classical Arabic, who coined the term al mashru’ al medani, “the civil project,” as a deliberate riposte to the Islamists’ so-called al mashru’ al hadhari or “civilization project”.

The motto served well for his work in exile from Sudan, in London as a leading human rights activist and champion of rights for women and non-Muslims, northern and southern Sudanese alike.

He was found dead in his home in south London, apparently stabbed to death in the early hours of 12 March. Police told the Guardian newspaper they are probing any connections between his death and his work promoting human rights in Sudan and helping torture victims seek redress.

Formerly chairman of the Sudan Human Rights Organization, re-founded in exile, he was among the first to step up and make the case for human rights and democracy as integral to a lasting peace as the Sudanese civil war ground to its bitter end.

After working to ensure Sudanese human rights with Justice Africa and later the Redress Trust a south London rights organisation which helps torture victims around the world, he was able to return to Khartoum again, and lay plans to end his long exile and resume his work at home.

During his time with Justice Africa, they and he shared office space with Index on Censorship in north London.  Henderson Mullin, Index CEO and publisher at the time recalled him as a “gentle giant” much liked by all. “He was a warm hearted and quietly intelligent man whose work for peace and democracy in Sudan kept him passionate but rarely angry, committed but never intransigent.”

Colleague and friend Alex de Waal described him as an unflinching advocate for human rights. Abdel Salam was, he said, “one of a remarkable generation of Sudanese intellectuals… who possessed a vivid curiosity about the complexities and paradoxes of their country.” He had a keen sense of the social and political context for making those rights real, ready to both dispute and mock both the excesses of Islamist zealots, and those who were intimidated by them.

And colleagues from the Redress Trust said they would “greatly miss his depth of knowledge and commitment and the conviviality with which he enriched our daily lives.”  He was divorced and leaves an adult daughter.