CAIRO (Reuters) – U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Molly Phee said she had met Sudan’s ousted prime minister Abdalla Hamdok during a visit to Khartoum on Tuesday and discussed ways forward to restore Sudan’s democratic transition.
No other details were immediately released on the meeting with Hamdok, who was placed under house arrest on Oct. 25 when the military seized power, upending a transition to democracy that began after autocrat Omar al-Bashir’s overthrow in 2019.
Phee, on a three-day visit to Sudan, also met army leader Abdel Fattah al-Burhan who told her that steps for releasing political detainees arrested during the takeover had begun, according to Sudanese state news agency Suna.
The U.S. Embassy said Phee also met with Mariam al-Mahdi, foreign minister in the administration that Burhan dissolved, “to show U.S. support for the civilian-led transitional government”.
The coup ended a transitional partnership between the military and civilian groups that had helped topple Bashir.
(Reporting by Nafisa Eltahir; Writing by Ahmad Elhamy and Aidan Lewis; Editing by Peter Graff and Mark Heinrich)
