Khartoum: On Monday, the US Embassy in Khartoum officially declared the removal of Sudan from the list of state sponsors of terrorism.
Xinhua news organization quoted the Embassy as saying in a Facebook post, “The congressional notification period of 45 days has lapsed and the Secretary of State has signed a notification declaring rescission of Sudan’s State Sponsor of Terrorism designation is effective as of today (December 14), to be published in the Federal Register.”
The US President Donald Trump on October 23 declared his intention of removing Sudan from the state sponsor of terrorism list once the African country deposits a $335 million settlement sum for victims of the 1998 twin bombings at the two American Embassies in Tanzania and Kenya.
Sudan had been listed as a state sponsor of terrorism since 1993. The other three countries on the list are Iran, Syria, and North Korea.
Because of the designation, Sudan faces a series of restrictions including a ban for defense exports and sales and limitations on US foreign assistance.
The Sudanese officials had been attempting to get off the list for a long time.
On August 7, 1998, simultaneous truck bomb blasts that occurred at the American Embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, took the lives of at least 224 individuals.
The assaults, which were linked to local members from the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, carried the Al Qaeda to the attention of the international community and prompted the FBI to designate Osama bin Laden on its list of 10 most-wanted fugitives.
Sudan, which was then under the initiative of the now-ousted Omar al-Bashir, sheltered bin Laden and was discovered to have assisted the Al Qaeda agents.
Sudan agreed to recognise Israel in October weeks after comparative moves by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain.
In the previous week, Morocco became the most recent Arab League country to agree to normalise relations with Israel.
