Paramilitaries accused of covering up killings in Sudan
Newshour
BBC
4.2 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 16 December 2025
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Researchers from Yale University say there's evidence that the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces have been trying to cover up mass killings in the Sudanese city of El Fasher by burning and burying bodies. We hear from one of the researchers who analysed satellite images of the area.
Also in the programme: the gunmen who carried out the deadly Bondi Beach attack in Australia spent most of last month in the Philippines; and why next year King's College, Cambridge, will have a new choir - of girls.
(Photo: Handout photograph of a woman and baby at the Zamzam displacement camp in North Darfur. Credit: MSF/Mohamed Zakaria/Handout via Reuters/File Photo)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:09.8 | Hello and welcome to NewsHour from the BBC World Service. We're coming to live from London. |
| 0:14.8 | We begin this hour in Elfasha, city in Western Sudan, besieged for more than 18 months, |
| 0:20.3 | which finally fell in October when the |
| 0:22.3 | Sudanese armed forces withdrew. What followed after the rival rapid support forces the |
| 0:27.5 | RSF took control is contested. The testimony of those who escaped described systematic massacre |
| 0:34.0 | of the previously besieged civilians. The RSF says it's investigating, but some |
| 0:39.4 | cooperation of violence exists already in videos posted on social media, in some cases by those |
| 0:44.9 | boasting of and showing the atrocities they committed. Today, after weeks of detailed observation, |
| 0:52.2 | the humanitarian research lab at the Yale School of Public Health in the United States has published what it concludes is evidence likely to show that tens of thousands of people were killed and their bodies disposed of by burning and in mass graves. |
| 1:07.1 | Journalists aren't able to enter Elfashire. The team at Yale say they cross-checked their satellite imagery with news reports, |
| 1:13.9 | including by the BBC's Barbara Plet Usher, |
| 1:16.2 | who at the end of October met those who were seeking refuge in Tohwila from what was happening in Elfasha. |
| 1:24.1 | A nurse is probing for bullets in the broken flesh of this man. His bare torso showing he was shot several times as he fled El Fasher. |
| 1:34.3 | By God, brother, someone coming from Alfashir says to you, you're a soldier. |
| 1:39.2 | You say to him, I'm not a soldier, and they say no, they threaten you with a weapon to your head. |
| 1:44.1 | What does that mean? |
| 1:45.5 | We don't understand anything. |
| 1:46.8 | They beat us badly and the thirst, the thirst. |
| 1:50.4 | They took our water and one of them says to the other, I will kill him. |
| 1:54.1 | And the other replies, let him die of thirst. |
| 2:00.3 | Ahmed Osman-Ibrahim got shot three times when the group he was with tried to escape, but he was one of the lucky ones. |
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