KHARTOUM – The defense team of ousted Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, 80, announced that he was transferred with former Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Mohamed Hussein and former Minister of Youth and Sports Youssef Abdel Fattah from Omdurman on Thursday to Meroe in the north of the country for treatment.
Lawyer Mohammed al-Hassan al-Amin, a member of Bashir’s defense team, told Al Jazeera Net that Bakri Hassan Saleh, former vice president, preceded Bashir, Hussein and Abdel Fattah to the military hospital in the city of Meroe 3 weeks ago after he was ill.
He explained that the transfer of al-Bashir and his companions from the Wadi Sedna military area in northern Omdurman came because they need escorts due to their health conditions and that entering and leaving the area faces security complications as well as bringing the medicines they use in a permanent manner.
Comrades in arms
The lawyer revealed that the former president and those with him were detained by a security decision, not a judicial one, after the police released all the arrested symbols of the former regime in April 2023, and wrote them a pledge to appear in court or return to the detention facility whenever requested to do so following the improvement of security conditions in the country.
A group of former senior army officers with the rank of lieutenant general who called themselves “comrades in arms” recently requested in a memorandum to the head of the Sovereignty Council and army commander Abdel Fattah al-Burhan to transfer al-Bashir and his detained comrades to Merowe hospital due to their health conditions, al-Amin said.
The lawyer stated that al-Bashir, Saleh, Hussein and Abdel Fattah each remained for 10 months during the war, in the Alia Hospital of the Medical Corps in Omdurman under the guard of military intelligence and judicial police, and suffered when the area was besieged by the Rapid Support Forces and shells landed in Bashir’s room.
In April, authorities transferred al-Bashir and his comrades to the Mohandessin area in central Omdurman after the army advanced and ended the siege of the area, before transferring them back to the Wadi Sedna military area in northern Omdurman.
Escape from death
The island net got a copy of the medical report on the state of health of Bashir and his companions, which was prepared by a medical team at Wadi Sedna Hospital, on April 17, and recommended the team to transfer them to complete the necessary tests and meet specialists Bmst
Al-Bashir and 17 military and civilian personnel were detained in connection with a communication related to the planning and execution of a military coup in 1989 against the government of elected Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi.
Since July 2020, the trial of al-Bashir and his companions began, and the former president was transferred from Kober prison in Khartoum North, the second city of the capital, to the military hospital before the outbreak of the war, and after the Rapid Support Forces stormed prisons in Khartoum, the defendants from the former regime came out of their place of detention after they wrote a pledge to appear before the court whenever it returned to exercise its duties.
The defense team said that Bashir and his aides were at risk of shells fired by the Rapid Support Forces, and that he escaped death twice, the first, when the room where he lived was bombed, while he was in another room in the hospital and the second time when he was praying with others.
Source : Al Jazeera
