Sudan's army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan has ordered a probe into what he called a "painful incident" near the Egyptian border, where an airstrike hit a gold mine two days earlier. The estimated death toll from the airstrike has risen to more than 200 dead, with dozens wounded and missing. Both the National Umma Party and the Darfur Victims Advocacy organization put the death toll at 200 and the number of injured at around 120. The Emergency Lawyers, a rights group documenting abuses in the war between Sudan's army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), said the strike in the mountainous Jabal al-Uqaydat mining area on Saturday killed 72 people. In a statement on Monday, Sudan's Transitional Sovereignty Council, which Burhan heads as army chief, said he had formed a fact-finding committee made up of prosecutors, judicial officials and security representatives "to investigate the circumstances of the incident" and "submit a report on the results.” The council added that Sudanese and Egyptian authorities "had remained in contact" since the strike to determine what happened. In a phone call with his Sudanese counterpart on Monday, Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty stressed the "mutual respect that binds the two brotherly nations,” including respect for each state's "territorial integrity and safety of its territory and borders.”
