Sadiq al-Mahdi, Sudan’s last democratically elected prime minister and leader of the country's largest political party, has died of COVID-19 in a hospital in the United Arab Emirates, his party said. He was 84.
Al-Mahdi was taken to Abu Dhabi for treatment in early November, and died late Wednesday. His body was expected to arrive in Sudan for burial Friday morning, the National Ummah Party tweeted. It had announced al-Mahdi tested positive for the coronavirus on Oct. 29.
Al-Mahdi was overthrown in a 1989 Islamist-backed coup that brought longtime autocrat Omar al-Bashir to power. Nearly three decades later, Al-Mahdi's party allied with a pro-democracy uprising in Sudan that led the military to overthrow al-Bashir in April 2019.
Sudan has since been ruled by a transitional military-civilian government. Elections could possibly be held in late 2022.
Al-Mahdi was one of the staunchest opponents of Sudan’s recent normalization of ties with Israel, which he dismissed as “an apartheid state” because of its treatment of the Palestinians. He also accused U.S. President Donald Trump of being racist against Muslims and Black people.
Sudan's government declared three days of national mourning starting Thursday. Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, deputy head of the country's ruling sovereign council, tweeted that the Sudanese people “lost a part of their history.”
The Sudanese Professionals’ Association, which spearheaded last year's uprising against al-Bashir, mourned al-Mahdi as “an inspiring leader.”
Al-Mahdi was born in December 1935 in Khartoum’s sister city of Omdurman. He was the grandson of Mohammad Ahmad al-Mahdi, a religious leader whose movement waged a successful war against Egyptian-Ottoman rule in Sudan in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Al-Mahdi served as prime minister in 1966-67 before a group of military officers led by Jaafar al-Nimeiri took power.
The veteran politician was jailed several times and forced into self-exile for years. He served as prime minister for a second time from 1986-89.
WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. military forces boarded another sanctioned tanker in the Indian Ocean after tracking the vessel from the Caribbean Sea in an effort to target illicit oil connected to Venezuela, the Pentagon said Sunday.
Venezuela had faced U.S. sanctions on its oil for several years, relying on a shadow fleet of falsely flagged tankers to smuggle crude into global supply chains. President Donald Trump ordered a quarantine of sanctioned tankers in December to pressure then-President Nicolás Maduro before Maduro was apprehended in January during an American military operation.
Several tankers fled the Venezuelan coast in the wake of the raid, including the ship that was boarded in the Indian Ocean overnight. The Defense Department said in a post on X that U.S. forces boarded the Veronica III, conducting “a right-of-visit, maritime interdiction and boarding.”
“The vessel tried to defy President Trump’s quarantine — hoping to slip away,” the Pentagon said. “We tracked it from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean, closed the distance, and shut it down.”
Video posted by the Pentagon shows U.S. troops boarding the tanker.
The Veronica III is a Panamanian-flagged vessel under U.S. sanctions related to Iran, according to the website of the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control.
The Veronica III left Venezuela on Jan. 3, the same day as Maduro's capture, with nearly 2 million barrels of crude and fuel oil, TankerTrackers.com posted Sunday on X.
“Since 2023, she’s been involved with Russian, Iranian and Venezuelan oil,” the organization said.
Samir Madani, co-founder of TankerTrackers.com, told The Associated Press in January that his organization used satellite imagery and surface-level photos to document that at least 16 tankers left the Venezuelan coast in contravention of the quarantine.
The Trump administration has been seizing tankers as part of its broader efforts to take control of the Venezuela's oil. The Pentagon did not say in the post whether the Veronica III was formally seized and placed under U.S. control, and later told the AP in an email that it had no additional information to provide beyond that post.
Last week, the U.S. military boarded a different tanker in the Indian Ocean, the Aquila II. The ship was being held while its ultimate fate was decided by the United States, according to a defense official who spoke last week on condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing decision-making.
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Associated Press writer Konstantin Toropin contributed to this report.
FILE - The Pentagon, the headquarters for the U.S. Department of Defense, is seen from the air, Sept. 20, 2025, in Arlington, Va. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, FIle)
