A wanted Sudanese war crimes suspect has confirmed that he and other members of the Islamist regime ousted in 2019 have escaped from prison during recent fighting, raising new fears for a fragile ceasefire that has enabled foreigners to flee.
The 72-hour ceasefire brokered by the United States was already struggling to hold after the regular army launched renewed air strikes against rival paramilitary forces in the capital late on Tuesday.
Anti-aircraft guns fired at fighter jets in the skies over Khartoum's sister city of Omdurman on Wednesday, witnesses told AFP.
Armed clashes meanwhile continued in Soba on the outskirts of Khartoum, witnesses said.
The escape of leading figures from the ousted regime of Omar Al-Bashir, at least one of whom is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur, has raised fears the conflict may take a turn for the worse.
Ahmed Harun, a top Bashir aide who led the regime's infamous counter-insurgency operations in Darfur in the mid-2000s, said late on Tuesday that he and other regime members had escaped from Kober prison.
The ousted dictator had himself been held in the same prison but the army confirmed on Wednesday that the 79-year-old had already been transferred to hospital before the current fighting erupted on 15 April.
Members of Bashir's regime, including the strongman himself, had been moved to a military hospital "due to their health conditions… and remain in the hospital under the guard of the judicial police", the army said in a statement, without specifying when they had been moved.
It was the third reported jail break to have taken advantage of the fighting between forces loyal to army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and those backing his deputy turned rival, RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Daglo.
"We remained in our detention at Kober, under the crossfire of this current battle, for nine days," even after the jail was emptied of both guards and prisoners, Harun said in a recorded address to Sudanese television.
He said he and fellow jailed regime members "had now taken responsibility for our protection in our own hands" in another location.
Separately, a ship carrying 1,687 civilians from more than 50 countries fleeing violence in Sudan docked in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday, the foreign ministry said, the largest evacuation effort by the Gulf kingdom so far.
Featured image credit: AFP via Getty Images