The Sudanese movement whose protests triggered the ouster of longtime President Omar al-Bashir called on its supporters to renew nighttime rallies to condemn the "massacre" of demonstrators at a Khartoum sit-in.

Thousands of protesters who had camped outside the Khartoum military headquarters for weeks were violently dispersed by gunmen in military fatigues on June 3, leaving dozens dead and hundreds wounded, according to doctors and witnesses. The sit-in was held for weeks, initially seeking the ouster of al-Bashir and later to demand that the army generals who toppled him hand power to a civilian administration. The protest camp was dispersed after talks between the Alliance for Freedom and Change, the umbrella protest movement and a transitional military council collapsed over installing civilian rule. At least 128 people have been killed since the June 3 crackdown, the majority the day the sit-in was cleared, according to doctors linked to the protest movement. The health ministry put that day's death toll nationwide at 61.

Meanwhile, Sudan's ruling military council said yesterday it will draw up a transitional technocrat government. "We will form a transitional government of technocrats as soon as possible until elections are held," Lt. General Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, the deputy chairman of the Transitional Military Council (TMC), told a rally in the capital Khartoum. The TMC is now overseeing a two-year "transitional period" during which it has pledged to hold free presidential elections. Sudanese popular protests, however, have continued to demand that the military council hand over power, at the earliest possible date, to a civilian authority.