Bashir April lie: Dozens remain in detention
Many prisoners, including women and children, are still held in custody most of them without charge.
On April 1, 2013 the Sudanese President al Bashir announced that all the political prisoners would be released that day. At the midnight of the same day, seven prisoners were released, six of them are belonging to the opposition parties that signed the New Dawn agreement in Kampala in early January, 2013. The released detainees are: the leader of the Islamic Wasat Party Yousif al-Koda, Brigadier Abdel-Aziz Khalid from the National Sudanese Alliance, Hisham al-Mufti from the United Democratic Unionist Party, Intisar al-Aqli from the Socialist Unionist Nasserite Party, Mohamed Zein al-Abdeen and Abdel-Rahim Abdullah from the Democratic Unionist Party and Hatem Ali.
The order of the Sudanese president didn’t include 33 women and six children in detention at Alobied Prison, all of them from Nuba mountains held since November 11, 2012 without charges, although the security accused them of cooperating with the Sudanese Peoples Liberation Movement/ North( SPLM/N) which is fighting the government in Nuba mountains since 2011. This is in addition to another 118 detainees from Nuba mountains and Blue Nile, detained after the war erupted in the both region in September 2011, who are still held.
There are also other detainees from Darfur and Nuba mountains in detention either in these regions or in Khartoum, among them Asmaa Ahmed Mansor, a Nuba woman was detained in Alabasy Tagaly. On October 27th, 2012, Alsadig Abdualraheim, a Nuba man, was detained in Alabasya Tagaly. Also another detainee is Hammad Ismaeil, once a candidate for the parliament from Alabassya in Southern Kordofan. He is detained since February 2012 and his whereabouts remain unknown. There are also dozens of detainees from Nuba mountains since the beginning of the war, their location and destiny remain unknown according to some families.
Arry Organization while welcoming the Sudanese government little step to release the detainees in its prisons and detention also expresses its extreme concern about the remaining detainees from Nuba mountains, Darfur and Blue Nile. Therefore we call on the Sudanese president to immediately extend his order to include the Sudanese detainees, either political activists or civilians or Prisoners of Conscience, and we call on the international and regional human rights mechanisms to continue putting pressure on the Sudanese government to release all the detainees or present charges against them.