Nearly 1,900 have been evacuated, says UK government, but final flight has yet to leave Khartoum
Britons are feared to have been stranded infollowing reports that the country’s armed forces had prevented a number of people from reaching the last rescue flights out of the war-torn country on Saturday.
– about 14 miles north of Khartoum and its twin city, Omdurman – while the Sudanese armed forces continued to attack the positions of the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary group. Once at the border, the situation only deteriorated as they were forced to wait in the desert for three days to cross. “It was a deadly trip,” she said. “At the border crossing, there was barely food, water and no bathrooms. Babies were crying as they lay on the ground. Women were very tired. Thousands of men were standing in very long lines to get visas.
On Saturday night shortly after 9pm, the Foreign Office said that the final flight, which had been scheduled to leave at 6pm, was still at the airfield near Khartoum. No reason was given for the delay. Anyone left behind faces an uncertain future and may choose to head north to Egypt, the opposite way to South Sudan or broadly east towards Port Sudan on the Red Sea.
Terrified refugees found little welcome on the border with Egypt, where just a few local police officers had been dispatched to process thousands of exhausted people. “Thousands of people were there at the crossing but very few border employees,” said Ameen, who said there had been only one police officer deployed to check hundreds of passports at a time.
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