A police chief and a protester were killed in protests calling for the military to step down in Khartoum
A Sudanese officer and a protester were killed, while security forces fired tear gas canisters again on Thursday at thousands of anti-coup protesters near the presidential palace in Khartoum, only days after the launch of a dialogue under the auspices of the United Nations, violence returned.
The Sudanese police press office said in an official statement posted on its Facebook page that Brigadier General Ali Brima Hamad was killed while "protecting the convoys" of the demonstrators.
The Sudanese police spokesman confirmed to the official television that the brigadier general "received several fatal stabs from a group of demonstrators."
For its part, the Central Doctors Committee (an independent union) said in a statement on Facebook that a demonstrator named Al-Rih Muhammad was killed "after being shot in the abdomen" by security forces during his participation in the demonstrations in the Bahri area, north of Khartoum.
This brings the number of victims of the security forces' repression of the demonstrations to 64.
By evening, Sudanese security forces stormed the headquarters of the "Al Arabi TV" station in Khartoum and "arrested the reporter Al-Tijani Khader and his team while covering," according to what the station and a headquarters in London said via Twitter.
These new demonstrations come a few days after the United Nations launched talks that included all Sudanese factions in an attempt to resolve the crisis caused by the coup carried out by the Sudanese army chief, Lieutenant-General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, against his civilian partners in power, on October 25.
The Sudanese street, for its part, rejects Egypt’s compromise over its demand for the departure of General Al-Burhan, as they had previously forced Al-Bashir to leave in 2019.
Despite the difficulty of the task due to the contradictory positions, the United Nations is trying to bring all the actors on the Sudanese arena back to the negotiating table.
On Monday, the United Nations representative in Khartoum, Volker Perthes, officially announced the launch of an initiative whereby he would hold bilateral meetings with the various parties before moving at a later stage to direct or indirect talks between them.
As Perthes asserted that there was "no objection" on the part of the military, a number of civilian factions rejected his idea.
The Sudanese Professionals Association, which played a key role in the protests that ousted al-Bashir, "totally rejected" such talks, while the Forces for Freedom and Change, the main civilian political bloc, demanded guarantees that such dialogue would not turn into a means of "legitimizing" the military council.
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