The odyssey of Saibella, the widow of the Kerala man who was killed by a stray bullet on April 15. His wife and her daughter had joined him for Passover. They transferred her this afternoon to a center of the company for which the man worked. The victim’s sister, Sister Reyma, : “Desperate and destroyed.”
New Delhi () – Saibella, the widow of Albert Augustine, the Indian Catholic citizen of Kerala who died last week from a stray bullet in the early stages of fighting between military groups in Sudan, has been trapped for days in the apartment where her husband was killed over a week ago. She herself denounced it in a desperate video call, before being transferred this afternoon to some facilities of the DAL Group, the Sudanese company for which the man worked.
In the video, Saibella, who is in Sudan with her daughter Marietta, desperately pleaded for the intervention of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and officials from the Indian embassy to get her to safety before the situation worsened further. “We are going through a terrible time,” she said, “we are out of food and water. We desperately need help. We have been trapped in our apartment for eight days.”
On Saturday, the area where they are located was still the scene of heavy fighting. “I’m scared when I hear shots,” the woman added in the video, “we’re in the basement.”
Saibella had arrived in Sudan with her daughter Marietta from India on April 3 to visit her husband for Easter. Albert Augustine died on April 15, hit by a stray bullet when he was by a window. The sister of the murdered man, Sister Remya, is a religious of the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Annecy and headmistress of Saint Joseph’s Community College in Bhubaneswar, Orissa.
“My parents are broken, old and sick: my father is 75, my mother is 65 and diabetic. Albert is their only child. My other sister is not married, so Albert was a man who took responsibility. My brother He has two children: the eldest is in Canada studying engineering, while his daughter – now stuck in Sudan with her mother – is in ninth grade.”
According to official reports, more than 3,000 Indian citizens are stranded in Sudan. For now, the New Delhi government relies on France and Saudi Arabia to manage the evacuation: the Indian army has sent its own planes to Jeddah and mobilized a naval unit. But the Indian media are circulating numerous calls from compatriots stranded by the fighting in Sudan. In particular, shock has been caused by the story of another Kerala citizen, a businessman named Boby Sebastian, who was flown to Khartoum but his pregnant Sudanese wife was not allowed on the evacuation flight due to problems with your documents. Faced with the news, the Indian authorities promised to take measures to unblock the situation.
