After a long period in the shadows, Ibrahim Ghandour, former head of Sudan’s outlawed National Congress Party (NCP) that was founded by deposed dictator Omar al-Bashir, reappeared on camera on April 8 to express his support for last October’s military coup that put an end to the country’s fragile democratic transition. Dressed in a white robe and matching headdress, Ghandour claimed in an interview with Al Jazeera that the seizure of power by the coup generals was, as they claim, a step in the corrective path. And he declared, without offering consistent arguments, that the situation in Sudan has since then improved.
His public appearance came just a day after news broke that Ghandour, who had served as foreign minister under Bashir, was to be released from prison where he had been since mid-2020, after being acquitted of multiple charges, including financing terrorism and plotting the assassination of former Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok, the NCP said in a statement.
