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CAIRO: Egypt evacuated 446 nationals and 189 others, including a Sudanese citizen in critical condition, from Sudan by road on Tuesday.
Ahmed Abu Zeid, a spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry, said the Egyptian embassy in Khartoum, consulates in Khartoum and Port Sudan, and consular office in Wadi Halfa continued efforts around the clock to evacuate Egyptians. So far, 1,539 have been evacuated from Sudan.
Efforts were underway to evacuate a number of Egyptians and their families from an airport near Khartoum as soon as the security situation improved, he added.
Soha Gendi, minister of state for emigration and Egyptian expatriate affairs, said citizens were being evacuated following the directives of President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi.
The process was being supervised by a national committee composed of all relevant agencies and institutions of the state in order to ensure the safety of citizens, Gendi added.
She appealed to the Egyptians stuck in Sudan to reach ports and airports, in coordination with the consulates in Port Sudan and the Wadi Halfa office, in preparation for their evacuation.
The General Authority for Land and Dry Ports affiliated with the Ministry of Transport is providing all facilities for Egyptians and other nationalities returning through the Qastal and Arqin border points, sources said.
Egyptian Red Crescent outlets have been opened at the two ports with a number of ambulances. There is coordination between all agencies working at the ports to accommodate the surging number of returnees of various nationalities, they said.
The Transport Ministry said that those without money had been made exempt from access fees.
Foreign countries with embassies in Egypt — notably China and Hungary — have coordinated with Egypt’s Foreign Ministry to receive their citizens.
All facilities were provided to the first group of Chinese nationals upon their arrival at the Qastal land port, according to a Transport Ministry statement.
The Foreign Ministry has offered condolences to the family of Mohamed El-Gharawi, assistant to the administrative attache at the Egyptian Embassy in Khartoum, who was killed on Monday while traveling to the embassy to follow up on evacuation procedures.
The ministry said that the Egyptian mission in Sudan would continue fulfilling its responsibility of evacuating people and ensuring their safe return to Egypt.
LONDON: Documents uncovered by The Guardian have called into question critical evidence used by Iraqi authorities to imprison Australian engineer Robert Pether, sparking calls for his release.
Pether and his colleague Khaled Saad Zaghloul were sentenced to five years in prison in 2021 and fined $12 million following allegations that their engineering firm defrauded the Iraqi government during the construction of the Central Bank of Iraq’s new headquarters.
CME Consulting, Pether’s employer, was accused of continuing to charge the government for the work of a subcontractor, Meinhardt, despite telling Meinhardt to cease all operations on the project almost immediately after the two firms signed a contract.
According to testimony obtained by Guardian Australia, a Meinhardt employee told an Iraqi court in May 2021 that CME had told the subcontractor to halt work “three weeks after signing the contract.”
The Meinhardt employee’s testimony said: “We left the issue and the accused, Khaled Saad Zaghloul, did not contact us at all.
“(We) told (the Central Bank of Iraq) that the accused Khaled Saad Zaghloul informed us in 2017 that the project had stopped so we left the case and we did not send any of our engineers to the project site and did not provide any engineering consultations.”
However, email communication suggests that considerable contact between CME and Meinhardt lasted for months, contradicting what the court was told.
According to records obtained by The Guardian, CME and top Meinhardt personnel exchanged 51 emails between January and July 2018. The last of these was dated over six months after the contract.
From May to late June 2018, the Meinhardt employee who provided the prosecution testimony was copied into five CME-Meinhardt communications, six months after he claimed all interaction had halted.
Meanwhile, Pether, a father of three, alleged that a “confession” statement used against him was mistranslated by a biased employee of Iraq’s central bank before being handed to court.
Pether told The Guardian: “I recognized (my) translator as soon as he came into the room. He was known to me since 2016.
“Apart from facial recognition, he also has some distinguishing marks and characteristics.”
The Guardian has obtained contemporaneous court records confirming Pether brought this up during his criminal trial and complained that his translated statement was flawed and incorrect.
The record read: “The judge asked if there was an issue with the translator. Mr. Pether advised that the translator used by the investigation court was an employee of CBI. The judge then asked if he was biased. Mr. Pether said yes.”
Pether has now spent two years in a Baghdad detention cell after his arrest there in April 2021.
CME was preparing to withdraw personnel from Iraq when the central bank wrote a letter to its Dubai headquarters on Mar. 29, 2021, demanding a “meeting in Baghdad urgently to discuss and resolve the dispute according to the terms of the contract and not through illegal withdrawal.”
“They were lured into returning to Iraq and are detained under false pretenses and on fabricated charges,” the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found in a November 2021 report.
“A representative of the central bank allegedly stated at one stage that this would ‘all go away’ if CME made large financial concessions and if (Pether and Zaghloul) agreed to stay in Iraq and finish working on the project for free.”
The Iraqi central bank had not paid any CME invoices for seven months, demanding CME accept the loss and continue working for free to compensate for project delays that were caused by a second central bank contractor.
The Central Bank of Iraq, the Iraq Prime Minister’s Office, the Iraqi Foreign Affairs Ministry and embassy to Australia did not respond to detailed questions by the time of The Guardian article’s publication.
“I have asked the Australian government to work with their close partners and the Iraq government at the highest levels to help secure my release,” Pether said.
JEDDAH: Diplomatic efforts intensified on Thursday to extend the fragile ceasefire in Sudan as new fighting raged in the war-ravaged Darfur region.
Armed fighters rampaged through the Darfur city of Genena, shooting at each other and looting shops and homes. Residents said the fighting was dragging in tribal militias, tapping into longtime hatreds between the region’s Arab and African communities.
Fighters from the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces attacked neighborhoods across Genena, driving families from their homes. The violence then spiraled with tribal fighters joining the battles. “The attacks come from all directions,” said Amany, a Genena resident. “All are fleeing.”
It was often unclear who was fighting whom, with a mix of RSF and tribal militias — some allies of the RSF, some opponents — all running rampant. The military had largely withdrawn to its barracks and residents were taking up arms to defend themselves, said Dr. Salah Tour of the Doctors’ Syndicate in West Darfur.
Fighters, some on motorcycles, roamed the streets, destroying and ransacking offices, shops and homes. “It’s a scorched earth war,” said Adam Haroun, a political activist in West Darfur. “The city is being destroyed.”
In the capital Khartoum and its neighboring city Omdurman, the ceasefire has brought a significant easing of fighting for the first time since the military and the RSF began fighting on April 15, turning residential neighborhoods into battlegrounds.
The relative calm has allowed foreign governments to bring thousands of people to safety. Saudi Arabia alone has rescued nearly 3,000 refugees by air and sea.
An East African initiative was pressing to extend the truce for another three days. The head of the military, Gen. Abdel Fattah Burhan, said he had accepted the proposal, but there was no response from his rival, RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo.
Thousands of people, mainly Sudanese, have been waiting at the border to cross north into Egypt. At the International University of Africa in Khartoum, where thousands of students are waiting to leave, there is no food, water or power. “Even as we sit here, almost everywhere you can hear gunshots. We are not safe here,” said Nigerian law student Umar Yusuf Yaru, 24.
At least 512 civilians and combatants have been killed since the fighting began, and another 4,200 injured.
BAGHDAD: More than 200 exhausted Iraqis evacuated from Sudan flew back to Baghdad on Thursday, with one saying he hadn’t seen the sun in 10 days because of the fighting.
Among the 234 people who were flown to Baghdad International Airport from Port Sudan were 16 Syrians, the foreign ministry said.
It was unclear whether they would stay in Iraq or return home.
“Overnight the war happened,” said 30-year-old Iraqi engineer Ahmed Al-Baldawi, his eyes red with fatigue.
“There was no food, no water and no electricity. For 10 days we didn’t see the sun.”
Evacuees arrived Thursday with stuffed backpacks and heavy suitcases, and one woman in a dark abaya carried her white cat in a plastic crate.
Another young woman burst into tears of relief as she left the airport.
The fighting broke out in Sudan on April 15 between Sudan’s army led by General Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces commanded by his deputy turned rival, Mohamed Hamdan Daglo.
At least 512 people have been killed and 4,193 wounded, according to official figures in Sudan, although the real toll is likely to be much higher.
Many countries have been taking advantage of a tenuos truce to evacuate their citizens by air, land and sea, even though fighting has continued with air strikes in the capital Khartoum.
An evacuation of Iraqis organized in conjunction with the United Arab Emirates embassy in Khartoum had been due to take place on Sunday, Baldawi said.
“We were happy and got ready, but then they told us it was only for Emiratis,” Baldawi told AFP.
“So we stayed stuck in our apartments. We were devastated.”
Robay Ahmed, 24, said he had returned to Iraq with his parents, brother and sister, 16 years after the family settled in Sudan.
“It was catastrophic,” he said. “We kept away from the windows and we stayed low. There was a lot of fear.”
Ahmed said he had just completed his medical studies to become a dentist.
“I couldn’t even get my diploma,” he said.
Before they could board their plane at Port Sudan, the evacuees had to travel nearly 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) by bus from Khartoum, a 12-hour journey on bumpy roads.
“The road is exhausting, it’s nickname is the ‘road of death’,” said Ibrahim Jomaa, the father of a young girl.
“The bus was tossed from left to right — we thought it was going to overturn.”
But Jomaa was still full of praise for the Iraqi authorities who had managed to arrange their transport to safety.
He recalled that when the first shots rang out on April 15, “we thought the situation would calm down. People went to work and the kids went to school.
“But then suddenly there was artillery and rocket fire, and warplanes overhead,” he said.
“We were the last to leave our building. It’s empty now.”
ISTANBUL: Turkiye’s ailing President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Thursday re-emerged from a two-day absence and spoke by video link with Vladimir Putin at a virtual ceremony unveiling a Russian-built nuclear power plant.
The 69-year-old leader suspended all campaigning for Turkiye’s pivotal May 14 election after getting sick while conducting a live TV interview on Tuesday evening.
Erdogan said he had developed an upset stomach while hopping between five cities for rallies and public project launches at the start of the week.
Health Minister Fahrettin Koca said on Thursday that Erdogan had “infectious gastroenteritis” — a short-term illness caused by the inflammation of the digestive tract.
But the scare forced Erdogan to cancel events on Wednesday and then stay at home instead of traveling to the Mediterranean coast for Thursday’s grand opening of Turkiye’s first nuclear power plant.
The video appearance represented Erdogan’s effort to project health and vigor at one of the more vulnerable moments of his two-decade rule.
But he looked wan and visibly frail as he addressed Putin and the nation from behind his presidential desk.
“Our country has risen to the league of nations with nuclear power, albeit after a 60-year delay,” Erdogan said in prepared remarks.
Putin praised Erdogan’s leadership and said Moscow was “always ready to extend the hand of friendship” to Turkiye.
“I want to say it straight: you know how to set ambitious goals and are confidently moving toward their implementation,” Putin added.
LONDON: European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has been criticized by Palestinians for using an “anti-Palestinian, racist trope” in her praise for Israeli democracy during her comments to mark the 75th anniversary of the founding of Israel.
In a video posted on Twitter by the EU embassy in the country, von der Leyen, who visited Israel and Palestine last year, paid tribute to Israel as “a vibrant democracy in the heart of the Middle East.”
Today we celebrate 75 years of Israel’s independence and friendship with Europe.
A special message from President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen: pic.twitter.com/TCi7GpfQWm
“We have more in common than geography would suggest; our shared culture, our values and hundreds of thousands of dual Israeli-EU citizens have created a deep connection,” she said, adding: “Your freedom is our freedom.”
She also praised the relationship between the EU and Israel but her comment about Israel making “the desert bloom” was strongly condemned by the Palestinian Foreign Ministry. The phrase is often used by Israelis to describe what they perceive to be the country’s successful development since it was established in 1948.
“The State of Palestine rejects the inappropriate, false and discriminatory remarks by the president of the European Commission, particularly the ‘make the desert bloom’ anti-Palestinian, racist trope in relation to Israel’s 75-year colonial project,” the ministry said.
Allow me to share an enhanced version of this message created in response by @rabetbypipd pic.twitter.com/u8G82G04Yq
It accused von der Leyen of “propagandist discourse” that undermines “the European Union’s standing and casts serious doubts on its declared commitment to international law and human rights.”
A spokesperson for the European Commission told the BBC on Thursday it was “unpleasantly surprised” by the “inappropriate statement” from the Palestinian Foreign Ministry “accusing the president of the European Commission of racism.”
The spokesperson said the commission was “requesting clarification” over what it described as an “unacceptable reaction” to the video.