Ex-minister suspected of genocide broken out of prison

A Sudanese war crimes suspect accused by the International Criminal Court of responsibility for genocide and rape has been broken out of prison as Sudan teeters on the brink of civil war.

Ahmed Haroun, a former minister of state for interior affairs, was freed from prison when the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) battling Sudan’s military released all the prisoners from Kober prison in the capital Khartoum.

The prison has also been holding ousted dictator Omar al-Bashir until he was moved to a military hospital shortly before fighting erupted on Apr 15.

Sudan’s interior ministry on Tuesday accused the RSF of breaking into five prisons and releasing the detainees between April 21-24. The RSF is led by Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, known as Hemedti, who is fighting Sudan’s military chief Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan for power.

Thousands of convicted criminals, including some sentenced to death, were held in Kober prison, along with senior and lower-ranking officials from the Bashir regime, which was ousted in 2019.

Sudanese authorities and the RSF traded accusations over the release of inmates, with the police saying paramilitary gunmen had stormed into five prisons over the weekend, killing several guards and opening the gates.

The RSF blamed authorities for letting Haroun and others out.

"This war, which is ignited by the ousted regime, will lead the country to collapse," said Sudan's Forces of Freedom and Change, a political grouping leading an internationally backed plan to transfer to civilian rule derailed by the eruption of fighting.

After 11 days of fighting between the RSF and the Sudanese military, the US brokered the latest attempt to halt the violence, a 72-hour ceasefire starting on Tuesday. But on Tuesday evening the Sudanese military launched renewed air strikes against the RSF.

Meanwhile, Haroun said in a statement published on Sudanese television that he and other Bashir-era officials had left the prison but that he was willing to appear before the judiciary when it resumed functioning.

"We made a decision to protect ourselves due to lack of security, water, food and treatment, as well as the death of many prisoners in Kober," Haroun told al-Sudani, a daily newspaper in Sudan with ties to Bashir.

He said he and fellow jailed regime members "had now taken responsibility for our protection in our own hands" in another location.

Other former officials were also moved with Bashir, 77, to the military-run Aliyaa hospital, the military said, among them former defence minister Abdel-Rahim Muhammad Hussein, another of the five Sudanese men wanted by the ICC.

The ICC issued charges against Bashir in 2009 while he was still president of Sudan, accusing him of responsibility for crimes against humanity - including murder, extermination, forcible transfer, torture and rape -  war crimes and genocide related to the Darfur conflict.

The United Nations estimated that over 300,000 people were killed and 2.5 million more displaced during the conflict, which started in 2003 and is still not completely resolved.

Bashir was ousted in a coup in 2019 after widespread popular protests against his rule. In 2021 Sudanese officials said they would hand Bashir and the other wanted officials over to the international body in The Hague, though the transfer never took place.