Sudan’s Al Bashir ‘moved from jail to hospital in Khartoum before the fighting broke out’
Omar Al Bashir, Sudan’s former president, was moved from Kober prison to a military hospital in Khartoum before fighting broke out there on April 15, the army said.
Al Bashir and 30 others are in police custody at the hospital on the recommendation of staff in Kober prison, where he was being detained, the army said yesterday.
The whereabouts of Al Bashir were under scrutiny after a former minister in his government, Ahmed Haroun, said on Tuesday he had left the prison with other former officials.
Both Al Bashir and Haroun are wanted by the International Criminal Court in connection with alleged human rights crimes in Darfur. Haroun told Sudan’s Tayba TV that they were ready to appear before the judiciary.
Sudan’s Interior Ministry said that the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces broke into five prisons, including Kober, and freed inmates between April 21 and 24.
Fighting flared in Sudan on Tuesday night despite a ceasefire declaration by the warring factions.
The Sudanese Armed Forces and the RSF agreed to a 72hour ceasefire beginning on
Tuesday after negotiations mediated by the US and Saudi Arabia.
It followed reports that inmates at the prison, which held former president Al Bashir and other senior deputies, had escaped this week.
Sudanese residents and foreigners fled Khartoum on Tuesday as fighting followed a three-day truce.
A series of short ceasefires in the past week have either failed or brought only short pauses in fighting between forces loyal to the country’s two leading generals.
At least 460 people, including civilians and fighters, have been killed, and more than 4,000 wounded in the fighting, the UN said, quoting Sudan’s Health Ministry. Aid agencies were concerned by the humanitarian situation in a country that is reliant on outside aid. Calls for negotiations to end the crisis in Africa’s third-largest nation have been ignored. For Sudanese, the departure of diplomats, aid workers and other foreigners, and the closure of embassies are signs that international powers expect the situation to get worse. UN Secretary General Antonio
Guterres said the power struggle was “lighting a fuse that could detonate across borders, causing immense suffering for years, and setting development back by decades”.
He urged the military and the RSF “to silence the guns”.
The conflict will not, and must not, be resolved on the battlefield,” Mr Guterres told an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council on Tuesday.
Thousands of Sudanese have fled Khartoum and its neighbouring city of Omdurman.
Bus stations in the capital were packed with people who had spent the night there in hopes of getting on a bus.
The ceasefire was announced by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, with the rival forces saying on Tuesday that they would observe the truce.
But fighting continued, with explosions, gunfire and the roar of fighter planes overhead around the capital region.
“They stop only when they run out of ammunition,” Omdurman resident Amin Ishaq said.
Al Roumy Hospital in Omdurman said it had suspended services after it was shelled on Tuesday.
“They don’t respect ceasefires,” said Atiya Abdalla Atiya, a senior figure in the Sudan Doctors’ Syndicate, a group that monitors casualties.