Sudan’s foreign minister said Tuesday that her country is nearing a deal with Washington to compensate the families of victims of deadly 1998 embassy bombings, paving the way to Khartoum’s removal from a US terror blacklist.
Massive, nearly simultaneous blasts at the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in August 1998 together killed 224 people and injured around 5,000, almost all of them Africans.
Al-Qaeda claimed the attacks, but the US accused Khartoum of aiding jihadists linked to the bombers and retaliated by destroying a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory in Sudan which it claimed was producing a nerve agent.
Washington has since demanded compensation for the American victims’ families, placed Sudan on a blacklist of state sponsors of terrorism and imposed crippling sanctions.
But Sudan’s Foreign Minister Asma Abdalla said on Tuesday that “the final touches of a settlement with victims of (the bombings) are being finalised.”
(With input from AFP)
