Sudanese launch new protests to pressure military

Sudanese activists were holding nationwide protests on Tuesday to press the military to hand over power to a civilian authority after the overthrow of President Omar al-Bashir earlier this month.

Railway workers and other protesters gathered in Atbara, the northern transport hub where the uprising began in December, and travelled by train to the capital to join tens of thousands outside the military headquarters in Khartoum, where protesters have kept up a sit-in since April 6.

Thousands of people poured into the streets to join marches and sit-ins in Khartoum's twin city of Omdurman and in the provinces of Kassala and South Kordofan.

Al-Bashir, who ruled Sudan for 30 years, was forced from office on April 11 after four months of protests led by the Sudanese Professionals Association, a group of private unions that is demanding a full and immediate transfer of power to a civilian council.

The SPA said security forces attempted to break up their gathering outside the military complex and that protesters saw bulldozers moving toward the sit-in.

They called for fortifying the barricades around the sit-in.

The SPA suspended talks with the military over the weekend after the military council said it was consulting all of Sudan's political forces on a path forward.

The protesters accuse the council of failing to make a clean break with al-Bashir's regime and of trying to marginalise the SPA by depicting it as one of many political factions.

The SPA says the head of the military council's political committee and its chief negotiator, Lt. Gen. Omar Zain al-Abdin, was the head of al-Bashir's party within the military and "is trying to bring back the deposed regime."