Sudanese stage night protests following killing of civilian

Scores of demonstrators in Sudan have taken to the streets in a Khartoum district to protest against the killing of a civilian allegedly by paramilitaries the previous day.

Riot police on Monday night looked on as a crowd waved Sudanese flags and chanted revolutionary slogans in the capital’s eastern district of Burri, a centre of protests since demonstrations first erupted in December, witnesses said.

The rally, which came hours after another protest was broken up by police in the city, was against the killing of a civilian on Sunday in the town of El-Souk in the state of Sinnar, southeast of Khartoum.

The civilian was killed in unrest when residents gathered in El-Souk to demand that members of the feared paramilitary Rapid Support Forces leave the town, according to residents and doctors close to the protest movement. The paramilitaries allegedly opened fired at the demonstrators.

According to the Central Committee of Sudanese Doctors (CCSD), six civilians have been killed in Sudan over the past three days, it said in a statement over Twitter. The CCSD held the Transitional Military Council (TMC) responsible for their deaths. 

In its statement on Monday, the coalition of Sudanese doctors said that four of the victims belonged to a single family in Omdurman. It said they were killed after a Rapid Support Forces (RSF) vehicle ran them over.

The committee said another of the victims was a young man identified as Mudathir Abdelrahman. He died in Darfur on Monday after a group of youth were beaten by “members of the Janjaweed militias” who accused them of stealing a mobile phone, said the statement.

Police disperal 

Earlier on Monday, about 200 protesters chanting “civilian rule, civilian rule” held a separate rally at a bus station in downtown Khartoum over the El-Souk violence.

They were swiftly dispersed by riot police who fired tear gas, according to witnesses, who said riot police beat several protesters and loaded them into trucks, while large numbers of police were deployed in the area.

Monday’s demonstrations in the capital came as protest leaders and the country’s ruling military council are working out the finer details of a landmark power-sharing agreement reached between the two sides earlier this month.

But in recent days these negotiations have been postponed twice following requests from protest leaders.

They are now scheduled to take place on Tuesday.

Protests first erupted in Sudan in December in response to the-then government of longtime ruler Omar al-Bashir‘s decision to triple the price of bread.

The protests swiftly turned into a nationwide campaign against his rule of three decades which finally led to his removal in April by the army.

Since then, a military council of generals has seized power, but a landmark agreement was reached between them and protest leaders to form a transitional ruling body that would oversee setting up a civilian administration in the northeast African country.