‘We’re not looking for bodies anymore, just scraps of DNA’

During a week of bloodshed in June, protesters in Sudan started vanishing. Seven months on dozens have still not been found. Bel Trew talks to the families of the disappeared

Sudanese protester Ismail, who vanished in June, features on a missing poster (Getty)

How can a person vanish without a trace? This is the question Sumia Osman, 58, asks herself every week, as she trawls through the hospitals, morgues and police stations in Khartoum looking for her missing son Ismail. The 24-year-old Sudanese student had joined his country’s revolution last year while on holiday from Maryland, in the US, where he was studying psychology.

He was last seen by his uncle on the evening of the 7 June getting into his car. There was a nasty edge to that night in the Sudanese capital. Members of the feared Rapid Support Forces (RSF) were playing “cat and mouse” with protesters who had tried to build barricades around the neighbourhood, the family said.

Four days earlier, the same paramilitary group had raided an anti-government sit-in killing over 100 people, and beating and raping others, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW). From that moment dozens of people who participated in the rallies began disappearing. Some have since been found dead. Others reappeared months later showing signs of physical and psychological torture.