“How is the government or Foreign Office or whatever going to contact people now?” the doctor said at lunchtime. Manal, a doctor in London, told the Guardian she had been lost contact with her 77-year-old mother, who had gone to attend a wedding in the country, because phone and internet connections were down. People in Britain worrying about relatives in Sudan, though, remained concerned. They arrived at the airport to set up and were ready around 11am, and with the ceasefire just about holding, a message went out from the Foreign Office telling people to travel “as soon as possible” to the airstrip, whose location was spelled out with GPS coordinates and the What Three Words mapping app. A Hercules transport, based at RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, took off early in the morning with 130 Royal Marines and consular and immigration staff on board. That changed shortly before 7am on Tuesday when James Cleverly, the foreign secretary, announced the UK was “coordinating an evacuation”. “It was important to us that, unlike in other countries, an evacuation not only applies to our embassy staff, but to all local Germans and our partners,” Baerbock added, in an undiplomatic sideswipe at the policy pursued so far by the US and, until Tuesday morning, the UK.Ĭriticism in Britain had mounted on Monday following the rescue of 24 embassy staff in a risky operation that involved elite forces, probably from the SAS, picking them up in Khartoum and taking them to Wadi Seidna since no evacuation had been offered to the 2,000-plus other stranded Britons. The first five flights had evacuated 490 people from 30 countries, highlighted as a “huge achievement” by the country’s foreign secretary Annalena Baerbock. A sixth and final German rescue flight, flying via Jordan, was due to leave on Tuesday evening. Germany took over air traffic control and five flights had departed between late on Sunday and Tuesday lunchtime. At that point, with fighting between the Sudanese government and RSF rebels still raging in and around Khartoum, Germany and France began their own evacuation process.
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