Wanted Sudan leader Bashir flies out of South Africa

 

The Pretoria High Court was due to decide whether he should be handed over to the International Criminal Court which charged him with the crimes.
Mr Bashir was in Johannesburg for an African Union (AU) summit.
A news conference will be held in Sudan's capital upon his arrival.
On Sunday, a judge barred Mr Bashir from leaving until the arrest application had been considered.
Mr Bashir is accused of committing war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide during the Darfur conflict.
The UN says that about 300,000 people in Sudan have died and more than two million have fled their homes since fighting began in 2003.
Government forces and allied Arab militias are accused of targeting black African civilians in the fight against rebels.
At the hearing at the Pretoria High Court, the lawyer representing the South African government said Mr Bashir's name was not on the list of passengers who took off earlier.
But the Sudanese state minister for information has told Reuters news agency that Mr Bashir's plane was expected to land in Khartoum at about 18:30 local time (1530 GMT).
It is unlikely that South Africa will face sanctions for allowing Mr Bashir to leave the country even after a court order barred him from doing so, says the BBC's Nomsa Maseko in Pretoria.
A number of African countries have in the past decided not to co-operate with the ICC. The court has been accused of racism and bias against African leaders.
So as things stand, Mr Bashir appears to have left South Africa with the blessing of the African Union, our correspondent says.
The South African press has been considering the repercussions of the attempt to arrest Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, who had been attending an AU summit.
IOL News said Mr Bashir's departure would leave "a major constitutional and diplomatic crisis and a big question mark over South Africa's continued membership of the ICC".
The Cape Times said the decision to invite the Sudanese president, despite his indictment by the ICC, had "exposed the fact that the AU considers the ICC largely irrelevant".
"This has the potential to sound the death knell of the ICC," the newspaper said, adding that the arrest "would set a precedent for other leaders on the continent who could be subject to the criminal jurisdiction of the ICC for their actions

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