A DELEGATION from the International Criminal Court (ICC) has arrived in Sudan to discuss bringing former president Omar al-Bashir to trial for war crimes.

The team, headed by chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda, arrived in Sudan on Saturday and will stay there until Wednesday.

“The ICC delegation will discuss methods of co-operation [with the Sudanese government] with regard to the suspects against whom the ICC has issued arrest warrants,” a statement from Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok’s office said.

Mr Bashir has been in a Khartoum jail since he was deposed last April after 30 years in power.

The authoritarian Islamist faces charges in Sudan including corruption and the ordering of attacks on the protest movement that ousted him.

Last year the new transitional government agreed to hand him over to the ICC to face charges of war crimes relating to the Darfur conflict.

The conflict began in 2003 when rebels rose up against the Khartoum government.

Mr Bashir is charged with masterminding a brutal response, launching a campaign of aerial bombings and using the feared Janjaweed militia — since rebranded as the Rapid Support Forces — to brutalise and murder the people of Darfur.

Some 300,000 people have been killed and 2.7 million people displaced since the conflict began.

Two other senior figures of the Bashir government are also indicted by the court: Abdel-Rahim Muhammad Hussein, who was Sudan’s interior and defence minister during the Darfur conflict, and Ahmed Haroun, a senior security chief at the time and later the leader of Mr Bashir’s party.

The trio faces charges of war crimes and genocide. Last week Sudanese prosecutors started their own investigation into the atrocities.