ANSD : Doctors hold silent sit-in for medic killed in Khartoum

MON 25 - 11 - 2024

Date: Jan 22, 2019
Source: The Daily Star

Doctors hold silent sit-in for medic killed in Khartoum

_{Agence France Presse}
KHARTOUM: About 150 doctors held a silent sit-in Monday outside a hospital in Sudan’s capital to protest the killing of a medic during anti-government protests in Khartoum last week, witnesses said. Deadly protests have rocked Sudan since Dec. 19 after a government decision to triple the original price of bread.

The demonstrations, which quickly morphed into nationwide rallies against President Omar al-Bashir’s three decades of rule, have left 26 people dead so far, according to officials.

Rights group Amnesty International has put the death toll at more than 40.

The medic was killed Thursday during clashes between protesters and security forces in the capital’s eastern district of Burri, according to a doctors’ committee linked to the Sudanese Professionals Association, which is leading the street protest movement.

Doctors, some dressed in white medical scrubs, staged the silent sit-in outside the Ahmad al-Gassib Hospital, where the late medic worked.

Carrying placards that read “Killing a doctor means killing a nation,” they stood in silence as security personnel deployed around the hospital, witnesses said.

Sarah Jackson, Amnesty’s deputy director for East Africa, said Friday it was an “outrage that Sudanese security forces continue to use lethal force on protesters and key service providers like doctors.”

Bashir rejected the accusations.

“The doctor who was killed in Burri was killed by a weapon that did not belong to the army, or NISS, or police,” the president said at a rally in the state of White Nile Sunday, referring to the country’s feared National Intelligence and Security Service.

“He was killed by someone from among the demonstrators.”

Although the protests began against the cutting of a vital bread subsidy, they come at a time when Sudan suffers from an economic crisis driven by an acute shortage of foreign currency and soaring inflation that has more than doubled the price of food and medicines.

The SPA has called for nighttime protests Tuesday in Khartoum and its twin city of Umm Durman.

More rallies were also planned for Thursday “across all towns and cities of Sudan,” the group announced last week.

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