24th April 2023
European Union (EU logo)
More than 1,000 European Union citizens were evacuated from conflict-hit Sudan over the weekend, the bloc’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said Monday. “It has been a complex operation and it has been a successful operation,” Borrell told journalists. Borrell said 21 diplomats from the EU’s mission in Khartoum were taken out and the EU ambassador had moved outside the capital to elsewhere in Sudan.
“I want to thank France especially for taking our people out,” he said.
“And I want to thank the combined efforts of many countries that took their nationals but also all nationals that they could pick.”
An EU official on Friday told AFP that there were an estimated 1,500 citizens from the bloc in Khartoum.
Across Khartoum, army and paramilitary troops have fought ferocious street battles since April 15, leaving behind charred tanks, gutted buildings and looted shops.
More than 420 people have been killed and thousands wounded, according to UN figures, amid fears of wider turmoil and a humanitarian disaster in one of the world’s poorest nations.
Borrell said on Sunday that he had spoken to rival commanders Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and Mohamed Hamdan Daglo to call for an “immediate ceasefire”.
AFP
Editor’s Note
In our post on February 19, 2023, in a story ‘Woman burns self to death over failure to offset N70,000 loan’, we reported that a middle-aged woman, simply known as Mama Dada, set herself ablaze over her inability to pay back a loan of N70,000 she reportedly took from a microfinance bank, LAPO. We have since discovered that the microfinance bank referred to in the story was not LAPO Microfinance Bank Limited. We apologise to the LAPO Group for the error in the identification of the name of the said microfinance bank where the deceased took the loan. The mix-up in the name of the MFB is not deliberate.
