At least nine Sudanese demonstrators were on Thursday killed as security forces sought to quash mass rallies of protesters demanding an end to military rule, pro-democracy medics said.
In one of the most violent days this year in an ongoing crackdown on the anti-coup movement, Agence France-Presse correspondents reported security forces firing tear gas and stun grenades to disperse tens of thousands of protesters.
“Even if we die, the military will not rule us,” protesters chanted, urging the reversal of a military coup by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan in October last year that prompted foreign governments to slash aid, deepening a chronic economic crisis.
Photo: AFP
At least seven of the nine killed were shot in the chest or the head, the Central Committee of Sudan Doctors said, raising the overall death toll to 112 from protest-related violence since October.
One of them was a minor killed by “a bullet in the chest,” the doctors said.
“Down with al-Burhan’s rule,” crowds chanted, with protests and violence flaring in the capital, Khartoum, and its suburbs, including the twin city of Omdurman, on the other side of the Nile river.
Security forces fired powerful water cannons, as protesters set fire to tires.
Medics also reported “several attempts to storm hospitals in Khartoum,” with security forces firing tear gas into one hospital, where some of those injured during the protests had been taken.
Protests in Khartoum were larger than normal, while demonstrations also took place in Wad Madani in the south, the western Darfur region, and the eastern states of Kassala and Gedaref, as well as Port Sudan, witnesses said.
Internet and phone lines had been disrupted since the early hours of Thursday, a measure the Sudanese authorities often impose to prevent mass gatherings.
By Thursday evening, communications were partially restored.
Security was tight in Khartoum despite the May lifting of a state of emergency imposed after the coup.
Troops and police blocked roads leading to army headquarters and the presidential palace, witnesses said.
Shops around the capital were largely shuttered.
Demonstrations continued in Omdurman as night fell, with crowds trying to remove security barricades in a bid to cross bridges to reach Khartoum, witnesses said.
Thursday’s rallies showed a “change in the balance of power in favor of the mass movement, and its goals of seizing complete civil authority and defeating the coup,” said the Forces for Freedom and Change, an alliance of civilian groups whose leaders were ousted in the coup.
UN Special Representative for Sudan Volker Perthes on Thursday said that the “violence needs to end,” while the US embassy in Khartoum urged restraint and “the protection of civilians so that no more lives are lost.”
The latest protests came on the anniversary of a coup in 1989 that toppled the country’s last elected civilian government and ushered in three decades of iron-fisted rule by Islamist-backed General Omar al-Bashir.
It is also the anniversary of 2019 protests demanding that the generals, who had ousted al-Bashir in a palace coup earlier that year, cede power to civilians.
Those protests led to the formation of the mixed civilian-military transitional government, which was toppled in last year’s coup.
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