KHARTOUM, Sudan — More than 40 bodies of people slain by Sudanese security forces were pulled from the Nile River in the capital of Khartoum, organizers of pro-democracy demonstrations said Wednesday, and new clashes brought the death toll in three days of the ruling military’s crackdown to 108.
The Sudan Doctors Committee, one of the protest groups, reported eight more deaths by late Wednesday and said at least 509 people had been wounded.
Word about the retrieval of the bodies came as Sudan’s ruling general called for a resumption of negotiations with the protest leaders, which they promptly rejected. They said the generals cannot be serious about talks while troops keep killing protesters.
A spokesman for the protesters said that instead they would continue their demonstrations and strikes seeking to pressure the military into handing over power to a civilian authority.
The reported discovery of the bodies in the Nile suggested that Monday’s violent dispersal of the protest movement’s main sit-in camp, outside military headquarters, was even bloodier than initially believed. The attack on the camp was led by a notorious paramilitary unit called the Rapid Support Forces, along with other troops who waded into the camp, opening fire and beating protesters.
During the mayhem, the Doctors Committee said witnesses reported seeing bodies loaded into military vehicles to be dumped into the river. The camp was not far from the Blue Nile, just upstream from where it joins the White Nile and then flows north through Sudan and Egypt to the Mediterranean.
The committee said in a statement that a day earlier, militiamen of the Rapid Support Forces were seen pulling 40 bodies from the river and taking them away. It said it was not known where they were taken.
One activist, Amal al-Zein, said the number could be even higher. She said activists and private citizens had pulled dozens more bodies from the Nile in areas near the sit-in and took them to a hospital morgue.
“Some bodies have wounds from bullets, others seemed to have (been) beaten and thrown in the Nile,” she said.
On Monday, the Doctors Committee put the death toll from the crackdown at 40. Another 10 were reported killed in clashes Tuesday in Khartoum and Omdurman, the capital’s twin city across the Nile, and farther south in the White Nile state.
At least 18 more were killed in clashes or died of earlier wounds Wednesday, the Doctors Committee said late in the day. The committee said it feared the final death toll would be much higher.
Protests continued in Omdurman and Khartoum’s central Bahri and Buri district, where clashes erupted with the Rapid Support Forces, activists said.
“In Buri, there were lots of shootings and tear gas,” said Hashim al-Sudani, an activist. “They tried to force people into narrow streets” to beat them.
The crackdown has turned a tense but relatively peaceful standoff between the military and the protest movement over the country’s future into a bloody confrontation that threatens to escalate.
Months of protests succeeded in forcing the ouster in April of strongman Omar al-Bashir, who had ruled Sudan for 30 years as head of a repressive state backed by the military and Islamists.
