Sudan's army arrests ICC-wanted Ahmed Haroun, ex-ruling party chief

Sudan's army has detained Ahmed Haroun, the man who chairs the country's former ruling National Congress Party and has been on the run for years, two NCP officials confirmed. The officials did not say why the military moved against a figure who has publicly backed its war effort.

Haroun is wanted by the International Criminal Court over alleged war crimes and genocide in Darfur in the early 2000s. He has long dismissed the charges as political, and the ICC had no immediate reaction to his detention. Sudan's army also stayed silent.

His arrest lands barely a day after he appeared in a televised podcast interview on Saturday, where he said the NCP and the army might not see eye to eye politically but were united in the civil war against the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.

That conflict has now run more than three years, unleashing waves of ethnic killings, famine and mass displacement. The United Nations calls it the world's biggest humanitarian crisis, and foreign powers have been pulled into the fight.

Haroun's party traces its roots to Sudan's Islamist movement, which dominated politics during the early years of ousted strongman Omar al-Bashir's rule in the 1990s. Operatives from that movement say they helped drive the army's advances against the RSF.

So the question hanging over Khartoum's circles now: why would the army jail an ally? The NCP officials offered no clue, and there was no word from the military on what comes next for a man the ICC has chased for two decades.