Six RSF militiamen sentenced to death by Sudan court for 2019 El Obeid massacre

The special court convened in the hall of the Legislative Assembly of North Kordofan in the state capital of El Obeid, today sentenced six members of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) to death for the murder of six people, including secondary school students, during a spontaneous demonstration against fuel, water, and bread shortages two years ago.

Presiding judge Ahmed Hassan El Rahama handed down the sentence, to six of the defendants, in the presence of Acting Attorney General Mubarak Mahmoud Osman. A seventh defendant’s case was refereed to the Juvenile Court, as he was still a minor at the time the massacre was committed.

The court reached its verdict after hearing testimony and evidence at 23 sittings. In statements to the official Sudan News Agency (SUNA), the resistance committees in North Kordofan stressed that this “is a case of all the people of Sudan,” and expressed their confidence in the fairness of the Sudanese judiciary, and their respect to its verdicts.

Massacre

The murders were committed when members of the RSF opened fire with live ammunition on a spontaneous demonstration in the North Kordofan capital on July 29, 2019, in what became known as the ‘El Obeid massacre‘. Radio Dabanga reported at the time that between 40 and 50 more people were wounded during the shooting.

The Sudan Doctors’ Central Committee listed students Ahmed Abdelgadir, Hasan Saad, Mohamed El Fateh, Badreldin Ismail, and Ahmed Abdelkarim among the dead.

The massacre prompted protests across Sudan, with mass rallies by secondary school and university students in Khartoum and the capitals of El Gezira, West Kordofan, South Darfur, White Nile state, Blue Nile state, Red Sea state, Kassala, El Gedaref, Nile River state, and the Northern State.

RSF

The ousted Omar Al Bashir regime used the paramilitary RSF, or Janjaweed as they are popularly called, as a tool of repression across Sudan and especially in Darfur. Members of the militia are responsible for a litany of abuses, assaults on civilian, rapes, and murders over the years, too numerous to mention. According to a 2015 Human Rights Watch report Men with no Mercy, the RSF were at that time accountable for “widespread systematic crimes against civilians”.

Video: Members of the RSF opened fire with live ammunition on a spontaneous demonstration
in the North Kordofan capital on July 29, 2019.