KHARTOUM: President Omar Al-Bashir arrived in Egypt on Tuesday for talks with his Egyptian counterpart Hosni Mubarak, after being declared winner in Sudan’s landmark elections, the official SUNA agency said.
Their meeting in the Red Sea resort of Sharm El-Sheikh was confirmed by a presidential source in Cairo.
Bashir, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes in the Darfur region, won 68 percent of the presidential vote on Monday after the country’s first multi-party elections in 24 years. Results in the parliamentary elections have not yet been announced.
Sadiq Al-Mahdi of the Umma party and Mohammed Osman Al-Mirghani of the Democratic Unionist Party, two Sudanese opposition heavyweights, who came first and second in the country’s last competitive election in 1986, were also in Cairo this week.
Egypt on Monday congratulated the Sudanese government on its first set of elections in more than two decades.
A foreign ministry statement said Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit "congratulated the Sudanese government and people" on the elections, described as "an important step towards implementing comprehensive peace."
The Sudan government is negotiating an end to a war in its western Darfur region that the United Nations says has claimed 300,000 lives since ethnic rebels took up arms in 2003. Khartoum puts the death toll at 10,000.
A two-decade civil war between the Muslim north and Christian and animist south ended in a 2005 peace agreement that gave semi-autonomy to the south and provided for an independence referendum in 2011.
Salva Kiir, leader of the former rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), was declared winner of the simultaneous election for the presidency of the south.
In his victory speech, Bashir pledged to work for peace in Darfur and said he was committed to holding the southern independence schedule on time. He also said that he wanted to form a national consensus government.
