Sudan's President al-Bashir arrives in Libya
Tripoli - Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, who is wanted by an international court for crimes against humanity, arrived in Libya Thursday in an unscheduled visit for talks with Libyan leader Muammar al-Qadhafi, the Libyan news agency (JANA) reported.
The satellite news channel al-Arabiya reported on Thursday that Al-Bashir, who arrived in Egypt Wednesday, had been scheduled to make Ethiopia the latest stop in his tour of countries that have not signed the Rome Statute on the International Criminal Court (ICC) and so are not obligated to execute the arrest warrant.
At the end of al-Bashir's meeting with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak Wednesday, Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul-Gheit reaffirmed Egypt's commitment to send doctors to Sudan to help make up for al-Bashir's expulsion of 13 aid organisations soon after the ICC issued its warrant for al-Bashir's arrest earlier this month.
Aboul-Gheit repeated Egypt's promise to coordinate with Arab and Islamic aid groups to help fill the gap left by the 13 international aid agencies' expulsion.
On Tuesday, the United Nations warned that more than 1 million Sudanese people risked losing access to housing, food, medicine, and other essentials as a result of those agencies' departure.
That warning followed news that a foreign aid worker had been killed in the troubled western Sudanese region of Darfur.
The ICC has accused al-Bashir of complicity in crimes against humanity committed in the government's campaign against rebels in the Darfur.
The United Nations says that 300,000 people have been killed, and that 2.7 million people have been killed since fighting in Darfur began in 2003. (dpa)