Soldiers Detain Prime Minister and Other Leaders in Sudan ‘Coup’
Armed forces detained Sudan’s prime minister over his refusal to support their “coup” on Monday, the information ministry said, after weeks of tensions between the military and civilian figures sharing power since the ouster of autocrat Omar al-Bashir.
Gathogo Wanjiru 
Civilian members of Sudan’s ruling council and ministers in Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok’s transitional government had also been detained, the ministry said in a statement on Facebook.
Internet services were cut across the country and the main roads and bridges connecting with Khartoum shuttered, it added.
Soldiers stormed the headquarters of Sudan’s state broadcaster in the capital’s twin city of Omdurman, the ministry said, as patriotic songs were aired on television.
People took to the streets, setting tyres ablaze and piling rows of bricks across roads to block them in protest against the military move, an AFP correspondent said.
“Civilian members of the transitional sovereign council and a number of ministers from the transitional government have been detained by joint military forces,” the ministry said.
“They have been led to an unidentified location,” it said.
It added that “after refusing to support the coup, an army force detained Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok and took him to an unidentified location”.
America’s Special Envoy for the Horn of Africa Jeffrey Feltman said “the US is deeply alarmed at reports of a military takeover of the transitional government”.
“Any changes to the transitional government by force put at risk US assistance,” Feltman said on Twitter.
The United Nations described the detentions as “unacceptable”.
“I am calling on security forces to immediately release all those unlawfully detained or put under house arrest,” said Volker Perthes, chief of the UN Integrated Transition Assistance Mission in Sudan.
