After a long period in the shadows, Ibrahim Ghandour, former head of Sudan’s outlawed National Congress Party (NCP) that was founded by deposed dictator Omar al-Bashir, reappeared on camera on April 8 to express his support for last October’s military coup that put an end to the country’s fragile democratic transition. Dressed in a white robe and matching headdress, Ghandour claimed in an interview with Al Jazeera that the seizure of power by the coup generals was, as they claim, a step in the corrective path. And he declared, without offering consistent arguments, that the situation in Sudan has since then improved.

His public appearance came just a day after news broke that Ghandour, who had served as foreign minister under Bashir, was to be released from prison where he had been since mid-2020, after being acquitted of multiple charges, including financing terrorism and plotting the assassination of former Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok, the NCP said in a statement.

Ghandour is one of the highest-ranking officers of the Bashir regime to be released from prison since the military assumed control of the transitional government. But he is not the only one. Since October, prominent figures from the NCP and the Bashir regime have been rehabilitated by coup authorities either by granting their release from prison, returning their assets, dropping the charges brought against them during the transition period or appointing them to senior state positions. In parallel, albeit with less pomp, judicial authorities are also reinstating throughout the civil service hundreds of former Bashir regime officials in a counterrevolutionary process that is raising concern in the pro-democracy movement.

“There is great concern among the revolutionaries, who represent a large segment of the Sudanese people, about the release of the leaders of NCP after the coup and the return of most of them to their positions in the civil service and vital sectors,” Mohamed Gamie, a Sudanese journalist and anti-coup activist, told Al-Monitor.