Protest leaders endangering national security: Sudan

khartoum — Sudan on Thursday accused campaigners spearheading protests against President Omar Al Bashir’s rule of threatening national security and advocating violence, as hundreds of demonstrators staged more rallies.

The country’s acting Information Minister Mamun Hassan warned of taking legal action against protest leaders after campaigners vowed to push on with their “uprising” against Bashir’s three-decade rule.

“It is confirmed what we always said that this... group is calling for violence,” Hassan said in a statement.

Protest campaigners on Wednesday held their first news conference at the offices of the main opposition National Umma Party since demonstrations erupted in December.

The Sudanese Professionals Association (SPA), which is leading the protests, and its allies called on other political groups to join their movement by signing a “Document for Freedom and Change”.

The text outlines a post-Bashir plan including rebuilding Sudan’s justice system and halting the African country’s dire economic decline, the key reason for nationwide demonstrations.

A senior representative of the National Umma Party, which has thrown its weight behind the protests, said at the event that it would continue the “uprising until this regime is overthrown”.

Party leader Sadiq Al Mahdi, a former prime minister whose government was toppled by Bashir in an Islamist-backed coup in 1989, last month called for the president to step down.

Protests first erupted in Sudan on December 19 in the farming town of Atbara after a government decision to triple the price of bread.

They quickly escalated into near-daily demonstrations across cities and towns. —