More busloads of demonstrators head for Sudanese capital

People from several parts of Sudan have arrived in Khartoum or are planning to travel to the country’s capital in support of the demonstrators at the sit-in in front of the General Command of the Sudanese army.

Hundreds of people from Atbara in northern Sudan arrive on the ‘freedom train’ to Khartoum, April 21, 2019 (middle-east-online)

People from several parts of Sudan have arrived in Khartoum or are planning to travel to the country’s capital in support of the demonstrators at the sit-in in front of the General Command of the Sudanese army, who demand the Transitional Military Council to step-down and hand power to a new civilian authority.

On Friday, dozens of buses loaded with people from Singa, capital of Sennar, and from Halawin in El Gezira arrived in Khartoum to support the protesters in front of the army command. “They chanted slogans demanding the handover of power to civilians, arrest of the figures of the former regime, and calling for freedom, justice and peace,” one of the demonstrators told Radio Dabanga.

North Kordofan

In El Obeid, capital of North Kordofan, protesters performed their Friday prayers in front of military command of the Fifth Infantry for the third week.

They urged the governor to respond to their demands by dismissing the leaders of the former regime in the state, dissolving its institutions, and cancelling the decisions of former Governor Ahmed Haroun, lawyer Osman Hussein told this station.

He said that the praying protesters were joined by people who came in about 10 buses from Bara, Um Rawaba, and El Rahad on their way to Khartoum in support of the sit-in “to communicate the demands of the people of North Kordofan”.

Eastern Sudan

Traders and shopkeepers in El Gedaref launched a campaign to collect money for the transportation of “a very large number of protesters to the sit-in in the General Command of the Armed Forces in Khartoum”, a trader reported from the town.

In Port Sudan, capital of Red Sea state, a protest march was launched by members of the Sudanese Professionals Association on Friday, in support of the sit-in in Khartoum.

On April 21, hundreds of people arrived on what activists called the ‘freedom train’, from Atbara in northern Sudan to Khartoum, to swell the sit-in outside the General Command, and to provide those already at the sit-in with food and supplies. Since then, groups of people arrived at the capital from various places in the country to back the demands of the demonstrators for a civilian government.