The body of an American diplomat gunned down in Khartoum was placed aboard a jet Thursday for a flight out of the country, and FBI agents arrived to investigate his slaying, U.S. Embassy officials said.

Washington had earlier said it would be sending officials from the FBI and the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security to determine who was responsible for the killing of John Granville, of Buffalo, N.Y.

“The FBI team is there working closely with local authorities and the diplomatic security team,” said Walter Braunohler, a public affairs officer at the embassy in Khartoum.

Granville’s body was taken in a large convoy from the hospital, where he was sent after the shooting, to the airport where the flag-draped coffin was loaded onto a KLM airliner in the presence of acting Charge d’Affaires Roberto Powers. Embassy officials refused to say where his body was being flown.

Granville, an official for the U.S. Agency for International Development, was being driven home about 4 a.m. Tuesday when another vehicle cut off his car and opened fire before fleeing the scene, the Interior Ministry said.

The driver, Abdel-Rahman Abbas, was also killed. Granville, who was hit by five bullets but initially survived, died after surgery, the embassy said.

Sudanese officials insist the shooting was not a terrorist attack, but the U.S. Embassy said it was too soon to determine the motive. There has been no claim of responsibility, and U.S. and Sudanese officials investigating the attack have not specified any suspects.

Attacks on foreigners are rare in Khartoum, where a U.S. diplomat was last killed in 1973.

The Foreign Ministry said Sudanese security services are “working actively to pursue the culprits, identify them and bring them to justice,” the official SUNA news agency reported.

The driver’s family said the two victims were heading home from a New Year’s party at the home of a British diplomat when the attack occurred.

Maj. Gen. Abdin el-Tahir, the director of criminal investigations, said little material evidence was found at the scene. But some witnesses have given information that could help police, he was quoted as saying by the semiofficial Sudan Media Center.

Granville, 33, was working to implement a 2005 peace agreement between Sudan’s north and south that ended more than two decades of civil war, USAID said.

The shooting came just as a joint U.N.-African peacekeeping force took over control in the war-torn eastern province of Darfur. Al-Qaida has called for a “jihad,” or holy war, against the peacekeepers.

But al-Qaida has shown little overt presence in Sudan in since the Sudanese government threw out Osama bin Laden in the late 1990s.