Mustapha Ahmed, director general of the National Emergency Management Agency has said that 800 students will be flown from Aswan tomorrow.
According to reports, after fighting broke out between the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces and the Sudanese army in the northeastern nation, the Nigerian government began airlifting Nigerians living in Sudan to safety.
He said “We have aircraft on the ground as we speak, two are in Aswan and our people are on their way to the airport, so hopefully, they will take off tomorrow morning and by tomorrow afternoon or evening, we will receive a large batch of almost 800 students.
“For Port Sudan, we will continue with the evacuation. Tarco is going back. Azman is going to do back-to-back evacuation because of its 400-seater capacity and we have already started engaging Air Peace to go back because of the 274-seater capacity.”
The returnees would receive trauma counselling, according to Abike Dabiri-Erewa, Chairman/Chief Executive Officer of the Nigerian in Diaspora Commission, NIDCOM.
She said “There will be trauma counselling for all the returnees because they have gone through a lot of traumas. Watch out for information on various websites of the emergency team on various counselling for everyone. We are talking to Dangote and some other NGOs about that.”
Since the nation began airlifting on Wednesday, 637 evacuees have been transported back home from Egypt and Port Sudan.
The first group of 376 passengers was flown on Wednesday evening, while the second batch of 130 passengers was evacuated on Friday by the Sudanese aircraft Tarco.
