KHARTOUM: Sudan’s ruling military council said Tuesday that a brother of ousted president Omar Al-Bashir who it previously announced had been detained was actually not in custody.
On April 17, the military council had announced that it had detained two of Bashir’s five brothers — Abdallah Hassan Al-Bashir and Al-Abbas Hassan Al-Bashir.
“This statement was not accurate,” military council spokesman Lt. Gen. Shamseddine Kabbashi told reporters early on Tuesday.
He said on April 17 Abdallah had been arrested, and the next day Abbas was seen in an area bordering with a neighboring country.
“Sudanese authorities have been in contact with this country but it has refused to hand him over to us,” he said without naming the country.
“Then news came that he is in Turkey,” Kabbashi said without specifying whether he was referring to recent media reports of Abbas being in Turkey.
Bashir himself is being held in Khartoum’s Kober prison, according to the council.
On Monday, Sudan’s prosecutor general’s office said Bashir had been charged over the killings of protesters during anti-regime protests that led to his ouster on April 11.
The charges form part of an investigation into the death of a medic killed during a protest in the capital’s eastern district of Burri, the prosecutor general’s office said in a statement.
Ninety people were killed in protest-related violence after demonstrations initially erupted in December, a doctors’ committee linked to the protest movement said last month.
The official death toll is 65.
On Monday, five protesters and an army major were shot dead in Khartoum, according to the committee, just hours after protest leaders and the ruling generals reached a breakthrough agreement on transitional authorities to run the country.
The army rulers who took power after Bashir’s ouster and protest leaders are engaged in negotiations over handing of power from the generals to a civilian administration.
Brother of Sudan’s Bashir not in detention: army
Brother of Sudan’s Bashir not in detention: army
- Bashir himself is being held in Khartoum’s Kober prison, according to the council
Father in intensive care after nine children killed in Israeli strike on Gaza
Hamdi Al-Najjar, himself a doctor, was at home in Khan Younis with his 10 children when an Israeli air strike occurred, killing all but one of them. He was rushed to the nearby Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza where he is being treated for his injuries.
Abdul Aziz Al-Farra, a thoracic surgeon, said Najjar had undergone two operations to stop bleeding in his abdomen and chest and that he sustained other wounds including to his head.
“May God heal him and help him,” Farra said, speaking by the bedside of an intubated and heavily bandaged Najjar.
The Israeli military has confirmed it conducted an air strike on Khan Younis on Friday but said it was targeting suspects in a structure that was close to Israeli soldiers.
The military is looking into claims that “uninvolved civilians” were killed, it said, adding that the military had evacuated civilians from the area before the operation began.
According to medical officials in Gaza, the nine children were aged between one and 12 years old. The child that survived, a boy, is in a serious but stable condition, the hospital has said.
Najjar’s wife, Alaa, also a doctor, was not at home at the time of the strike. She was treating Palestinians injured in Israel’s more than 20-month war in Gaza against Hamas in the same hospital where her husband and son are receiving care.
“She went to her house and saw her children burned, may God help her,” said Tahani Yahya Al-Najjar of her sister-in-law.
“With everything we are going through only God gives us strength.”
Tahani visited her brother in hospital on Sunday, whispering to him that she was there: “You are okay, this will pass.”
On Saturday, Ali Al-Najjar said that he rushed to his brother’s house after the strike, which had sparked a fire that threatened to collapse the home, and searched through the rubble. “We started pulling out charred bodies,” he said.
In its statement about the air strike, the Israeli military said Khan Younis was a “dangerous war zone.”
Practically all of Gaza’s more than 2 million Palestinians have been displaced after more than 20 months of war.
The war erupted when Hamas attacked Israel in October 2023, killing around 1,200, mostly civilians, and abducting 251 more.
The retaliatory campaign, that Israel has said is aimed at uprooting Hamas and securing the release of the hostages, has killed more than 53,000 Palestinians, Gazan health officials say.
Most of them are civilians, including more than 16,500 children under the age of 18, according to Gaza’s health ministry.
Iraq’s water reserves lowest in 80 years: official
- Iraqi spokesperson of the Water Resources Ministry Khaled Shamal says the country hasn't seen such a low reserve in 80 years
- Iraq is considered by the United Nations to be one of the five most impacted countries by climate change
BAGHDAD: Iraq’s water reserves are at their lowest in 80 years after a dry rainy season, a government official said Sunday, as its share from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers shrinks.
Water is a major issue in the country of 46 million people undergoing a serious environmental crisis because of climate change, drought, rising temperatures and declining rainfall.
Authorities also blame upstream dams built in neighboring Iran and Turkiye for dramatically lowering the flow of the once-mighty Tigris and Euphrates, which have irrigated Iraq for millennia.
“The summer season should begin with at least 18 billion cubic meters... yet we only have about 10 billion cubic meters,” water resources ministry spokesperson Khaled Shamal told AFP.
“Last year our strategic reserves were better. It was double what we have now,” Shamal said.
“We haven’t seen such a low reserve in 80 years,” he added, saying this was mostly due to the reduced flow from the two rivers.
Iraq currently receives less than 40 percent of its share from the Tigris and Euphrates, according to Shamal.
He said sparse rainfall this winter and low water levels from melting snow has worsened the situation in Iraq, considered by the United Nations to be one of the five countries most vulnerable to some impacts of climate change.
Water shortages have forced many farmers in Iraq to abandon the land, and authorities have drastically reduced farming activity to ensure sufficient supplies of drinking water.
Agricultural planning in Iraq always depends on water, and this year it aims to preserve “green spaces and productive areas” amounting to more than 1.5 million Iraqi dunams (375,000 hectares), said Shamal.
Last year, authorities allowed farmers to cultivate 2.5 million dunams of corn, rice, and orchards, according to the water ministry.
Water has been a source of tension between Iraq and Turkiye, which has urged Baghdad to adopt efficient water management plans.
In 2024, Iraq and Turkiye signed a 10-year “framework agreement,” mostly to invest in projects to ensure better water resources management.
Israeli strikes kill 23 in Gaza, including a journalist and rescue service official
- Israeli fire kills at least 23 people in Gaza
- Israel controls 77 percent of Gaza Strip, Hamas media office says
CAIRO: Israeli military strikes killed at least 23 Palestinians across the Gaza Strip on Sunday, including a local journalist and a senior rescue service official, local health authorities said.
The latest deaths in the Israeli campaign resulted from separate Israeli strikes in Khan Younis in the south, Jabalia in the north and Nuseirat in the central Gaza Strip, medics said.
In Jabalia, they said local journalist Hassan Majdi Abu Warda and several family members were killed by an airstrike that hit his house earlier on Sunday.
Another airstrike in Nuseirat killed Ashraf Abu Nar, a senior official in the territory’s civil emergency service, and his wife in their house, medics added.
There was no immediate comment by the Israeli military.
The Hamas-run Gaza government media office said that Abu Warda’s death raised the number of Palestinian journalists killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023, to 220.
In a separate statement, the media office said Israeli forces were in control of 77 percent of the Gaza Strip, either through ground forces or evacuation orders and bombardment that keeps residents away from their homes.
The armed wing of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad said in separate statements on Sunday that fighters carried out several ambushes and attacks using bombs and anti-tank rockets against Israeli forces operating in several areas across Gaza.
On Friday the Israeli military said it had conducted more strikes in Gaza overnight, hitting 75 targets including weapons storage facilities and rocket launchers.
Israel launched an air and ground war in Gaza after Hamas militants’ cross-border attack on October 7, 2023, which killed 1,200 people by Israeli tallies with 251 hostages abducted into Gaza.
The conflict has killed more than 53,900 Palestinians, according to Gaza health authorities, and devastated the coastal strip. Aid groups say signs of severe malnutrition are widespread.
Israeli military says it intercepted missile from Yemen
- Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthis have continued to fire missiles at Israel in what they say is solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza
CAIRO: The Israeli military said on Sunday that it had intercepted a missile launched from Yemen toward Israel.
Sirens sounded in several areas in the country, the Israeli military said earlier.
Since the start of the Israel-Hamas war in October 2023, Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthis have continued to fire missiles at Israel in what they say is solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza.
Most of the group’s missile have been intercepted or have fallen short.
The Houthis did not immediately comment on the latest missile launch.
Syria to help locate missing Americans
DAMASCUS: Syria’s new authorities have agreed to help the United States locate and return Americans who went missing in the war-torn country, a US envoy said on Sunday.
“The new Syrian government has agreed to assist the USA in locating and returning USA citizens or their remains. The families of Austin Tice, Majd Kamalmaz, and Kayla Mueller must have closure,” US special envoy for Syria Tom Barrack wrote on X.
