Khartoum - Sudanese authorities have
arrested several top members of the former ruling party of
ousted President Omar al-Bashir, in a move that could bolster
military rulers who are under mounting pressure by protesters to
hand power to civilians.
In another part of a widening crackdown designed to remove
remnants of Bashir's rule, the transitional military council
(TMC) said it will retire all eight of the officers ranked
lieutenant general in the National Intelligence and Security
Service.
Opposition groups had demanded that the security agencies be
restructured.
Sudan's public prosecutor has begun investigating Bashir on
charges of money laundering and possession of large sums of
foreign currency without legal grounds, a judicial source said
earlier on Saturday.
The source said military intelligence officers who searched
Bashir's home found suitcases loaded with more than $351,000 and
six million euros, as well as five million Sudanese pounds.
"The chief public prosecutor ... ordered the (former)
president detained and quickly questioned in preparation to put
him on trial," the judicial source told Reuters.
"The public prosecution will question the former president
in Kobar prison," the source said. Bashir has not been
questioned yet, the source added. Two of his brothers were also
detained on allegations of corruption, the source said.
Relatives could not immediately be reached on Saturday for
comment about the investigation.
Separately, a source in Bashir's National Congress Party
said authorities arrested the acting party head Ahmed Haroun,
former first vice president Ali Osman Taha, former Bashir aide
Awad al-Jaz, the secretary general of the Islamic movement
Al-Zubair Ahmed Hassan and former parliament speaker Ahmed
Ibrahim al-Taher.
The source also said parliament speaker Ibrahim Ahmed Omar
and presidential aide Nafie Ali Nafie were under house arrest.
Bashir, who is also being sought by the International
Criminal Court (ICC) over allegations of genocide in Sudan's
western Darfur region, was ousted on April 11 by the military
following months of protests against his rule and had been held
at a presidential residence.
His family said this week that the former president had been
moved to the high-security Kobar prison in Khartoum.
Hassan Bashir, a professor of political science at the
University of Neelain, said the measures against Bashir are
intended as a message to other figures associated with his rule
that they are not above the law.
"The trial is a step that the military council wants to take
to satisfy the protesters by presenting al-Bashir for trial," he
said.
Bashir survived several armed rebellions, economic crises,
and attempts by the West to turn him into a pariah during his
30-year rule before he was toppled in a military coup.
At a sit-in outside Sudan's Ministry of Defence that began
on April 6, protesters, who sleep on the pavement, stood besides
posters of Bashir that called on the ICC to put him on trial.