Madrid (EFE)
This was stated by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, in an interview on RNE collected by EFE, regarding the evacuation this Monday of 104 civilian citizens from Sudan, where 62 Spanish soldiers still remain.
Among these soldiers are the members of the Air Force, the Paratrooper Brigade and the Special Operations Command who have participated in the rescue and who will arrive in Madrid “in the next few hours”, said the Defense Minister, Margarita Robles, in a video distributed by his department.
Among the evacuees there are, in addition to Spaniards, Portuguese, Italian, Polish, Irish, Mexican, Venezuelan, Colombian, Argentine and Sudanese citizens.
Robles has celebrated the success of the evacuation operation carried out by the Spanish Armed Forces and has assured that “these have been very dangerous and very intense days”, and has thanked the work of the diplomatic service.
Albares stressed, for his part, that the operation has been “extremely delicate” from the point of view of security due to the war context in which it took place and the difficulties in regrouping all citizens.
All of them had to go to the regrouping point and go look for them in the middle of fighting, but fortunately there was no incident with the Spanish convoy, he pointed out.
“All the Spaniards, including our military, are already out of Sudan or in the safe base of Djibouti,” the minister assured.
The Spanish military plane took off from the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, shortly before 11:00 p.m. (peninsular time) bound for Djibouti, from where it departed for the Torrejón de Ardoz air base (Madrid).
The rescue operation has been coordinated by the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Defense.