An investigation - Sarah Al-Areifi
When he disappeared, the young Sudanese man, Ahmed Mohamed Mahmoud, who had been married, had given birth to a woman who did not make it clear to him to see his father, the grief remained around the family that did not know whether he was alive or dead, and the pain of his absence, still waiting for his return at any moment His brother Ali says.
Ahmed's news was interrupted during the events of breaking the sit-in of the General Command in Khartoum on June 3, 2019, which ended nearly three months of the sit-in of millions of citizens demanding the departure of the Omar al-Bashir regime.
A year after what has become known as the massacre of the general leadership and the changing political scene, dozens of families are still waiting for the appearance of their children who participated in the sit-in and disappeared after the day of the massacre, while the souls of the families who found the bodies of their children died days after their disappearance, but they are waiting for a fair retribution for them .
"Al-Jazeera Net" tried to explore this file, its circumstances and its changes, and conducted interviews with the families and friends of some of the missing persons, through which they monitored their suffering in searching for their children in hospitals, police stations, prisons, and even inside the dead refrigerators. She also met with the Attorney General in Sudan, as well as the Chairman and some members of the Commission of Inquiry and Fact-Finding in the Missing Persons Case, to find out the latest developments in this important file.
Forced detention and disappearance
Days after the sit-in was lifted, the NTC authorities released a group of protestors who were forcibly detained in secret locations after they were arrested by forces wearing military uniforms believed to have been involved in the sit-in, as part of a violent campaign accompanied by widespread security and human rights violations.
A source from one of the resistance committees, known as the "Central Field Committee," told Al-Jazeera Net that their follow-up to the matter revealed that the missing in the first months to break the sit-in were distributed between detainees of the Security Service and others belonging to the Rapid Support Forces, while some were thrown into the police cells and their detention did not last long.
"Manal" recounts for the first time what happened with her and she says to Al-Jazeera Net, "I was sleeping inside a tent in the sit-in field, and I woke to the sounds of bullets outside the tent before it was stormed by individuals in the uniform of quick support, and they raided the women inside it and took them in cars to an unknown destination."
The convoy of cars arrived at offices spread over two floors of the security apparatus - as Manal later knew - with nine women, six of whom worked in selling tea and food in the sit-in field and three of the activists, and from time to time a cart loaded with young men arrived. "We were detained in a large office and spent the night Lying on the floor after they brought us a bean meal for dinner. "
Manal's family searched for their daughter in hospitals, morgues, police stations, and on the banks of the Nile, without finding her. After 12 days, she and her co-workers were released without being investigated or charged. Manal Mashhad describes the release of the group, saying, "We went up to the Box cars before dawn, they asked us to lower our heads, after an hour they ordered us to come down and found ourselves in the West Omdurman region."
Dozens of detainees such as Manal and her group were not fortunate. Many remained missing until now, while the Nile preached the bodies of some of them, others were found in the morgues, and they were mysteriously killed, and some were buried merely as numbers.
Committees without reports
After the return of the Internet service on July 9, which was interrupted immediately after the sit-in was broken off on June 3, volunteer groups and initiatives have activated on social media pages aimed at finding missing persons by posting their photos and information, but these initiatives were informal and failed to Communicate with government agencies directly.
Groups of lawyers and human rights activists appeared and pressed the judicial authorities to expedite the formation of a formal investigation committee that would unveil the whereabouts of the missing.
Three months after the massacre of the General Command, specifically on September 23, the then-appointed public prosecutor, Abdullah Ahmad Abdullah, formed a committee to investigate and investigate the missing persons, with the committee to submit its final report two months after the start of its work. The committee was then reconstituted after the addition of other members in early October.
After announcing the membership of the last committee and before it started its work, it was contested because it included representatives of the families of martyrs, lawyers, and civil society organizations interested in the cases of enforced disappearance.
After tension, attraction and disagreements over the membership of the committee, the new Attorney General, "Taj al-Sir al-Inkr" issued a decision on November 13, 2019 to restructure the committee, to include 14 members headed by lawyer al-Tayyib al-Abbasi with the addition of representatives from the "Missing" initiative and a representative of the families of the missing.
The new committee was supposed to submit its final report three months after its formation, but this step has been postponed until now - for various reasons - after about seven months of its formation. So when will the final report of the commission be announced?
We asked this question to the lawyer, "Othman Al-Basri," a member of the committee and the lawyer for the families of the missing. The response was that there was no specific time frame with the confirmation that the investigation was going on "very well" according to his description.
Al-Basri confirms that the committee reached "facts that cannot be disclosed at present and that it continues its work in the investigation and investigation, and there are many hospitals from secret detention centers and homes that have not reached them yet."
He adds that the Attorney General always reiterates in his meetings that the committee is an international merit committee and therefore must be continuous, and this, of course, means that the extension may be continuous and without a specific time limit, as he put it.
On the obstacles faced by the committee, Al-Basri said that "the police professionalism is one of the biggest obstacles." Its mechanism for following up on the missing persons' reports is marred by many deficiencies, and there is chaos and randomness in dealing with this sensitive issue, this chaos created by the former regime.
He explains that the reports of missing persons "are written down until now under Article" 44 "disappearance in mysterious circumstances, without a doubt, the state now needs experienced police, specialized research teams and an advanced system."
We surveyed the opinions of lawyers and human rights activists on their expectations for the results of the committee, and most of them confirm that this committee will not reach convincing results for those involved in the forcible disappearance of those missing, and they believe that the solution is to form an international commission of inquiry with broad powers that have the ability to reach those responsible for enforced absence For the missing without any political effects.
Multiple initiatives and conflicting numbers
There have been many initiatives and committees seeking to find the missing, and they differed in restricting their numbers. The Sudanese Professionals Caucus issued a statement issued on July 20, 2019 that hundreds of people had disappeared after the massacre, and launched a campaign to search for them, but did not specify the number of missing persons.
In August, the rally revealed that 40 of them had been found. As for the "Missing" initiative, which is one of the voluntary initiatives that took place after the dissolution of the sit-in, it announced at the same time that 45 missing persons had appeared, and 22 others still unaccounted for had disappeared before and after the dissolution of the sit-in.
On the reason for this inconsistency in the numbers of missing persons, Othman Al-Basri, a member of the Missing Committee and the lawyer assigned to their families, believes that it is difficult to limit their numbers for various reasons, the most important of which is that some families did not write missing reports, while others lived in the peripheral villages in the various cities of Sudan, and these are their children in particular. For months.
Al-Basri adds that the sit-in field was a microcosm from Sudan, which included a large number of processions that came from different states to participate in that event, adding that the Missing Committee is still receiving reports of loss despite the passage of one year since the sit-in was closed.
The people ... the journey of suffering
The suffering of the families of the missing began the moment they heard the break-up of the sit-in, and from there they started a journey to search for them in all possible ways, and despite the notes of the disappearance being recorded in the police records and following all legal procedures, the responsible authorities did not move a step in searching for them or returning to their families to ask about anything new related to this Open communications.
"Al-Jazeera Net" continued the suffering of the family of the missing Ahmed Mohamed in his search for it, immediately after the break-up of the sit-in, as I started calling him on his phone, but to no avail, as the phone remained closed until now. The family did not surrender, and her search led her to all the prisons, hospitals, and morgues in the triangular capital without benefit.
We called Ali, the brother of the missing Ahmed, and informed us that he was inside a bus on his way to the capital, Khartoum, after a visit to the city of "Sinja", where the family received a call saying that Ahmed was in the city prison, but he was not found there.
And he confirms that his missing brother does not belong to any political party and that he is "an ordinary citizen who participated in the sit-in as a matter of responsibility towards his country and was helping to distribute food to fasting people at breakfast time as part of his duties in the field."
Ali adds that after the streets calmed down, they went to the police station to report on the loss of Ahmed, but the police did not respond, and they were not able to obtain the missing missing report only after the investigation committee intervened.
The missing Ismail El-Tajani Elias arrived in Khartoum in early April 2019 from the United States, where he was studying at the University of Maryland Department of Criminal Psychology and participated in the sit-in in front of the General Command of the Armed Forces and was lost three days after the sit-in was broken.
His family toured all the places where he expected to find him and searched hospitals, morgues, prisons, and known security forces detention centers, and he did not find any trace on him. And his mother, Mrs. Sumaya Othman Ibn Auf, continues her research with hope of knowing his fate and the fate of the rest of the missing, confirming in her talk to Al-Jazeera Net that fair justice and achieving the goals of the Sudanese revolution are based on resolving this file.
The Nile exposes the massacre
On June 5, 2019 (i.e., two days after the sit-in was broken), the Sudan Central Doctors ’Committee had announced the recovery of 40 bodies from the Nile River, and their announcement coincided with the spread of a video on the media that a photographer said that a group wearing the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) dumping bodies in the Nile .
In the video filmed on the morning of June 3, one of the bridges of Khartoum is shown from a distance, while his cameraman says the RSF is throwing people into the "sea", which means the Nile.
This video with the announcement of the Doctors ’Committee reinforced the hypothesis that a large group of missing persons were thrown into the Nile after being tied to the concrete blocks, some of them were alive when they were tied and others were martyred before that, and they were thrown into the Nile for the purpose of disposal of their bodies, and among them was the young" Qusay " Thank you. "
The body of Qusai, 23, was in the Nile for three days before being thrown into the water on June 5, 2019. In the first week of October, the family of the missing Qusai received a great shock, because their son was found, but in the Omdurman morgue. About four months after the sit-in was broken.
Umm Qusai lived throughout this period in the hope that her only son - among a group of sisters - is alive and possibly detained somewhere, especially as a video clip circulated on social networking sites showed Qusai and some of his colleagues running near the sit-in amid the sounds of live bullets.
In conjunction with this video, activists circulated a clip showing a police car carrying two bodies at noon on the bank of the Nile, despite being bound by concrete blocks. No one realized at the time that Qusay was one of them and that - while his family and friends were searching for him - he was in the morgue's refrigerator, and no one knows anything about him except that he has serial number 824.
The director of the Omdurman morgue, Dr. Jamal Yusef, tells Al-Jazeera Net that he received Qusai’s body on June 5 at 2 pm after being transferred from the Droshab Police Department north of Khartoum North. After the autopsy, it became clear that the cause of death was the injury of two bullets, one of which penetrated his chest, while it was The body is tied from the feet with concrete blocks painted in the colors of the ancient Sudanese flag.
With the help of the Missing Initiative, Dr. Jamal adds, he compared the clothes of Qusai that he was wearing the last time he was seen on the day of the massacre with the clothes that were on the body, and found them similar. Qusai’s family was contacted, who returned to the same morgue that had previously been searched in vain, and it was very difficult to recognize him due to the deformities that appeared on the body, but the DNA examination showed that it was identical to his mother.
Qusay was not the only missing person who was found dead on the same day and in the place. The martyr "Yasser Ahmed Ali" in the police car was also bound with cement blocks, and he came to the refrigerator in the morgue and became the owner of the number 825, but he did not keep this number long after it came His family the next day to receive it and bury it.
On the day of the massacre, the twenty-year-old Yasser was also wounded by a bullet in his neck, then he was tied with concrete blocks and then disposed of his body in the Nile. The current swept him and Qusay to the "Al-Ziraqab" area, from where they were subsequently handed over to the Omdurman morgue, after a report was filed at the Droshab city prosecutor under Article 51 of the Sudanese Criminal Law relating to death in mysterious circumstances.
Later in the morgue, they found a phone chip and numbers recorded on a sheet in his pants pocket, in which they were shown to his family on the phone of one of his friends who knew them in the sit-in field, so he recognized him later in the morgue, and he initiated what the police did not do and informed his family of the sad news after he found their numbers in the slide.
Two options to die
The missing Badr al-Din Rabih Muhammad Ali is similar to Qusay and Yasser at the place of death, and differs from them in his way. He was jogging with his friend to get out of the sit-in area, upon their arrival at the Blue Nile Bridge, a group in the fast support forces uniform intercepted their patrolling way in a way to die, either by shooting or jumping from the bridge to the Nile, and they had two options, one of them being bitter, so they preferred the second option.
Rafik Badr al-Din survived because he learned to swim in contrast to the martyr who was swallowed by the Nile. His body subsequently floated on the banks of the Nile near Totti Island, and the people of the area carried the body to the Omdurman morgue to join the rest of the martyrs who were there.
Dr. Jamal Yusef says that the body of Badr al-Din did not carry any injuries and his body does not bear any sign of an accident, but on the contrary, he was in complete restitution and the autopsy showed that the cause of death was "drowning."
Two days after finding the body, his friend, who was accompanying him in the sit-in and jumping to the Nile, came looking for him and found him in the refrigerator. Badr al-Din was not the only one who had to jump, according to testimonies from those present on the day the sit-in was broken, because a large group of them did not find a way out after the attacking forces surrounded them except jumping in the Nile hoping to survive, some of them survived and the rest died drowning.
Slasher maze
After the massacre of the leadership, the morgue was packed with bodies that did not exceed its absorptive capacity. Some refrigerators had two bodies sharing. ”Thus, an eyewitness described the condition of the morgue. On the day of the breaking of the sit-in, the Omdurman morgue alone received 17 bodies, including 14 from the sit-in area.
We asked the member of the Investigation Board for the Missing Othman Al-Basri: Why is the delay in searching for the bodies of the missing? Does this mean deficiency in the work of the committee? Because it is self-evident that the morgue is one of the places expected to search for missing persons. Al-Basri hesitated before answering, then he said decisively: "We visited all the morgue at the time, and details of what happened there will appear in the report of the committee."
We met the director of the Omdurman morgue, Jamal Youssef, and we asked him: Why is the delay in identifying the bodies? His answer was that this was not one of his duties, but that of the police, and that his work was limited to autopsy and determining the cause of death with matching DNA samples, if any.
He adds that "all the belongings that come with the body are preserved by forensic evidence after photographing the dead and raising his fingerprints, and monthly we report the case to the corpses, and we may request confirmation that some of them are buried in designated graves according to certain agreed standards."
This was what the director of the Bashaer morgue in Khartoum did at the time. The pathologist, Aqil Siwar al-Dahab, approved on October 5 the burial of three unidentified bodies after their features had changed and after preserving the results of DNA, which called for the director of the forensic medicine Hisham Zain Al-Abidin To his dismissal from his post on the pretext of burying unknown bodies in the presence of missing persons searching for their families.
Al-Jazeera Net met the doctor, Siwar Al-Dahab, who defended himself saying, "My dismissal decision is invalid because I followed the legal procedures and obtained prior permission from the prosecution to bury." We asked him a question among the families of the missing "Why did he not contact them before the burial to take a sample of their DNA" he replied that The opportunity still exists for any family to be certain if any of the bodies belonged to their missing persons, because the images and DNA details were preserved.
Monitoring of forensic evidence
The Department of Investigations for Al-Jazeera Net reveals its monitoring of the number of bodies found since the beginning of June 2019 until the thirtieth of it, which are 97 corpses, 28 of which are unidentified.
In his speech, the director of criminal evidence Haider Syed Ahmed indicates that 9 "drowned" bodies were found, of which 5 were unidentified, and 45 bodies had no criminal effects, of which 19 were unknown, and 36 bodies were found killed by the white weapon, of which 4 were unidentified, and 7 were also killed With a bullet, one of which is unknown. "
The official explains that the unidentified bodies all follow the events of the sit-in and that they were found in the same month, and he considers that the numbers mentioned by some voluntary initiatives and organizations about hundreds of missing persons are "unhealthy and bear clear inflation."
Are lost and lost memory
After days of breaking up the sit-in, several youth initiatives were formed that included specialists in providing psychological support to the families of the missing and later to help the returnees from enforced disappearance in order to overcome the negative psychological effects of the violent events they witnessed during the moments of the sit-in dissolution and the treatment they received during the period of their detention or their disappearance in random places where they took refuge After the accident.
Among the volunteers in these initiatives is psychological treatment, Enas Abdel Hadi, who revealed in an interview to Al Jazeera Net about the extent of the detainees' psychological suffering as a result of what they were exposed to during their detention, as well as their families.
Weeks after the massacre, the social media circulated news about the return of some of the people who were driving in the family and were in a poor psychological and physical condition, and some of them were amnesia. This news was accompanied by videos that show people who appear disturbed and amazed and chant the sit-in.
Three months after the sit-in was broken, Amal Lagos returned to her memory-lost family after the children of her neighborhood found her in a deplorable state. No one knows what happened to her and what happened with her during her absence, and Amal could not identify her children, so she was transferred to psychiatric treatment and is still under the supervision of doctors there until now.
Amal, 29, is the mother of three children, the youngest of whom was 1 year and eight months old when his mother, who used to prepare tea and sold it to the protesters, disappeared and stayed for hours in the sit-in area to disappear and her news would be cut off after his silver. Social activist Jalila Khamis says that the Amal family lost hope to find it after visiting all hospitals, morgues and prisons, before it appeared without a memory.
A member of the Central Doctors Committee d. Muhammad Salah al-Fahal (one of the psychiatrists who started assessing the psychological states of the missing driving) said that he found three cases of missing persons who had returned in an unstable state, not knowing who they were and where they were. He refers to two cases of missing persons driving on 3 June, during which he suffered from varying mental disorders. One of them was classified as having an "acute psychotic disorder" and usually affects the person who was tortured, he said.
Where are the missing? .. Question by drawing justice
What we reached through our investigation of this file is that the answer to this question is quite simple: No one from the families of the individuals who are still missing until now knows their location, including the committees commissioned by the state.
According to the evaluation, which is based on the available data so far, the existing assumptions about the situation of the missing indicate the following:
- They were killed while breaking up the sit-in, and their bodies were transferred to morgues, and few were identified through their possessions or by DNA analysis. As for the rest of the bodies in the morgue, it was difficult to identify them through this analysis, and the difficulty of keeping them to distort the bodies and their accumulation and the lack of sufficient numbers of refrigerators for the dead to accommodate them, they were buried in the graves designated for these cases without identifying them.
- They were killed during the dispersal of the sit-in by the security forces, their bodies were dumped in the Nile or buried in mass graves in unknown places, and this hypothesis is reinforced by the situation in which the bodies of Qusay and Yasser were found, as well as the appearance of eyewitnesses who talked about the existence of mass graves west of the city of Omdurman.
- Some of the protestors were subjected to torture and severe psychological pressure after witnessing the mass killings and the grave violations that took place there, who were stranded and intimidated, and they became wandering on their faces in the streets, and they have no place in them.
They were arrested while the sit-in was over, and they were transferred to secret detention and places, which means that they are still under forced detention.
And all of these possibilities may have happened together.
After a full year has passed since the sit-in was resolved, the families of the missing people are still waiting to know the fate of their missing children and whether they are alive. While public opinion in Sudan is awaiting the results of the investigation committee to find out which party or agencies have detained and hid these people.
According to current speculation, the accusations were distributed among several parties believed to have participated in breaking up the sit-in, including the Rapid Support Forces and the Popular Defense Forces and the so-called shadow brigades and student militias that were supervised by officials of the previous regime, while the participation of regular forces in forced disappearances is excluded.