Sudan fires scores of diplomats

KHARTOUM – Sudan has fired scores of diplomats for alleged links to the administration of toppled President Omar al-Bashir, a legal committee said on Saturday.

The Empowerment Removal Committee was formed under a law introduced in November to dismantle the system built by Bashir, who was ousted in April last year after nearly three decades in power.

“One-hundred-and-nine ambassadors, diplomats and administrators were fired from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and those were appointed through political and social empowerment,” Mohamed al-Faki, deputy head of the committee, told a news conference in the capital, Khartoum.

Some of the diplomats were appointed by Bashir himself and the others were picked through his now dissolved National Congress Party, said Taha Othman, a member of the committee. Earlier this month, the committee dissolved the boards of the country’s central bank and 11 other state-owned banks and fired the managers of eight of the banks.

It also seized the assets of the former ruling party last month.

Meanwhile, Cameroon President Paul Biya agreed on Sunday with his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, that an impartial probe was needed after gunmen killed 22 people in a village at the heart of a separatist insurgency last month, the French presidency said.

The two leaders spoke by phone about the Feb. 14 attack in a village in western Cameroon, where gunmen in military uniforms and masks shot women and children and burned others in their homes.

“They agreed an impartial probe was needed in reaction to the violence committed against civilians in the village of Ngarbuh in the northwestern province,” the French presidency said in a statement.

Cameroon’s army since 2017 has been fighting English-speaking militias seeking to form a breakaway state called Ambazonia amid the cocoa farms and forests of west Cameroon.-Reuters.