Some 100 people evacuated by Spain from Sudan, including a Portuguese woman, arrived in Madrid on Monday on a military plane, the Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, reported in a post on the social network Twitter.
The plane landed at the Torrejón de Ardoz military base, in the Community of Madrid, at around 11:20 a.m. local time (10:20 a.m. in Lisbon).
Spain announced on Sunday night that it had managed to evacuate a hundred people from Sudan by air, including a Portuguese woman, as part of the movement to leave the African country of foreign citizens and diplomatic personnel due to the violent clashes that occurred more than one year old week
The Spanish military plane took off from Khartoum shortly before 11:00 p.m. local time (10:00 p.m. Lisbon time) this Sunday “with a hundred passengers,” as reported by the Spanish government in a statement, and made a stopover in Djibouti.
In addition to Spaniards, among the passengers there are Portuguese, Italians, Poles, Irish, Mexicans, Venezuelans, Colombians and Argentines, as well as Sudanese, detail sources from the Spanish Ministry of Defense.
José Manuel Albares said this Monday morning, in an interview with the Spanish Public Radio (RTVE), that it is an “extremely delicate operation”, since it takes place in the midst of “a war conflict”, but that It ended up producing without incident.
According to the Spanish multinational, the most complicated thing was to regroup the people who wanted to leave Sudan within this operation and said that the group that arrived in Madrid on Monday includes all the Spanish diplomatic personnel in the African country.
“In this context of war, which we hope will be brief, there are no possible diplomatic relations,” he said.
The Portuguese multinational, João Gomes Cravinho, said Monday that of the 22 Portuguese who were in Sudan, 21 had expressed their intention to leave and only one chose to stay in the African country.
Gomes Cravinho clarified that there are several missions to get people out of Sudan, within which Portuguese citizens leave.
“It is not a coordination of the European Union, there is very close coordination, mine and that of the Minister of Defense with the allies, particularly France and Spain,” he said.
“We are seeing if it makes sense to send a Portuguese Air Force asset or if, on the contrary, it is possible that they come with other allied planes to closer places and then the Air Force will pick them up,” he added.
Violent clashes have been taking place in Sudan since April 15, in a conflict between the forces of General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the country’s leader since the 2021 coup, and a former deputy who has become a rival, General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, who commands the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary group.
The provisional balance of the clashes indicates that there are more than 420 dead and 3,700 injured, according to the World Health Organization.
Source: TSF
