US removes Sudan from blacklist
Khartoum, Dec 14 (efe-epa).- The United States on Monday took the final step to remove Sudan from its list of the countries sponsoring terrorism, the US embassy in Khartoum said in a statement published on its Facebook account.
“The congressional notification period of 45 days has lapsed and the Secretary of State (Mike Pompeo) has signed a notification stating rescission of Sudan’s State Sponsor of Terrorism designation is effective as of today (December 14), to be published in the Federal Register,” the brief statement ran.
On 23 October, US President Donald Trump announced he had signed an executive order to drop Sudan from the blacklist, on which it featured for nearly 30 years, since 1993.
It was originally blacklisted over the support the regime of former president Omar al-Bashir provided for figures including al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden, who lived in the African country for five years.
Trump had said he would remove Sudan from the blacklist after Khartoum had paid $335 million in compensation for the families of the victims of terror.
Sudan has already deposited the compensation sums in a joint account.
Shortly afterwards, Trump announced that Sudan and Israel would normalize ties after continuous pressure by the US administration for months.
Sudanese authorities acknowledged that establishing diplomatic ties with Israel was a condition for removing Khartoum from the blacklist.
US courts have held Sudan responsible for being an accessory to the al-Qaeda attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and the bombing of the destroyer USS Cole in 2000 in the waters of the Gulf of Aden.
The African country had been desperate to be removed from the blacklist to normalize its relations with multilateral credit organizations amid a severe, protracted economic crisis.
