Omar al-Bashir is moved to a Khartoum military hospital as his family asks to send him abroad

Ousted Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir has been moved to a military-run hospital in Khartoum for treatment and needs care outside the country, his lawyer said on 1 October. Mohamed Alhassan Alameen told Reuters that Bashir, 82, had been sent to the capital for tests and that his symptoms required diagnosis and treatment Sudan could not provide. The family said on Wednesday that the need had become critical and that official permission to send him abroad had not arrived. The military did not respond to a request for comment. The precise condition was not published.

Bashir was removed in April 2019 by the army and the Rapid Support Forces after months of street protests. He was moved from prison to hospital before the current war began, then transferred to Merowe in northern Sudan and held under military guard. The move back to Khartoum puts him inside a capital that has changed hands more than once since April 2023, when the army and the RSF fell out over plans to merge and started the war that has emptied much of the city.

The warrants that travel with him

Any transfer abroad runs into two legal files. The International Criminal Court wants Bashir on charges including genocide, related to the Darfur campaign of the 2000s. Sudanese courts also have open cases against him from the period after his fall. A medical evacuation does not cancel either file. It creates a jurisdiction problem: the country that receives him has to decide whether it will treat a patient and also whether it will arrest an accused man. Several Sudanese Islamist figures called on social media for the transfer. That call is a political ask from his old base. It is not a travel document.

The family's statement is careful on this point. It asks for treatment outside Sudan. It does not name a hospital or a country. Alameen said the symptoms needed outside diagnosis. He did not list them. The gap is why the army's silence matters. A transfer from Merowe to a Khartoum military hospital can be arranged by the force that holds him. A flight out of the country cannot, unless that force signs the permission the family says it has not received.

Why Merowe was the holding place

Merowe, in the north, stayed in army hands when Khartoum did not. Holding an 82-year-old former president there kept him away from the RSF and away from the street politics of the capital. Bringing him back to Khartoum means the army is confident enough of the hospital, and of the road or the flight that carried him, to move a prisoner it has a reason to keep alive. It also means his medical file is now in a city whose civilian hospitals have been looted, occupied and abandoned in turns. A military hospital is the facility that still has power, staff and a perimeter.

The war is three and a half years old. Bashir has been a prisoner through all of it, first in the transition that was supposed to lead to civilian rule, then in the war that ended that transition. His allies in the Islamist networks that staffed parts of the old security state have used his illness as an argument for release. His opponents treat any medical flight as a risk of escape from the ICC case. Both arguments sit on top of an unpublished diagnosis.

What a permission slip would change

If the army refuses the flight, Bashir stays in the Khartoum military hospital and the family statement stands as an unmet request. If the army allows it, the receiving state inherits the warrants. Neighbours that have taken Sudanese wounded before have not taken an ICC fugitive. Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf hospitals that treat senior African patients would each have to answer the court. The lawyer's line on 1 October does not force that choice. It records that the army has moved him once, from Merowe to Khartoum, and has not moved him the second time, out of the country. The condition that would justify the second move has not been named in public.