The leader of Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has declared an investigation into what he called violations committed by his soldiers during the capture of el-Fasher. The announcement by Gen Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, came after escalating reports of civilian killings following the RSF takeover of the city in the Darfur region on Sunday. The RSF leader spoke after international outrage about reports of mass killings in el-Fasher, apparently documented by his paramilitary fighters in social media videos.A spokesman for the paramilitary group has since denied further accusations by medics that the RSF had killed more 400 people at a hospital in the city on Tuesday.BBC Verify has analysed the footage confirming that they show the RSF soldiers executing a number of unarmed people in the city.The UN Security Council is holding an emergency session on Sudan, which is in its third year of civil war between the army and the paramilitary fighters.British Foreign Office Minister Stephen Doughty said the UK had called the meeting as the “scale of suffering is unconscionable, often based on ethnicity, women and girls facing sexual and gender-based violence, and there is evidence mounting of defenceless civilians being executed and tortured”.He was responding to an urgent question tabled in Parliament by Labour MP and former development minister Anneliese Dodds, who said the hospital attack “surely must be a turning point in this war and the international community’s focus on it”.The RSF has also denied widespread allegations that the killings in el-Fasher are ethnically motivated and follow a pattern of the Arab paramilitaries targeting non-Arab populations.Hemedti said he was sorry for the disaster that had befallen the people of el-Fasher and admitted there had been violations by his forces, which would be investigated by a committee that has now arrived in the city.However, observers say similar promises …
