SUDAN’S brutal crackdown last summer on the revolutionary upsurge that toppled long-term tyrant Omar al-Bashir might amount to a crime against humanity, Human Rights Watch has concluded in a new report.

The New York-based charity says it has evidence that military chiefs planned the violent dispersal of the sit-in in Khartoum.

Attacks on protesters killed at least 128 people before the army itself opted to oust Mr Bashir. It also documents protesters being raped and stabbed, beaten, forcibly shaved, forced to crawl through sewage and urinated upon.

Transitional Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok has appointed a committee to investigate the violence.

The Sudanese Communist Party, which played a leading role in the revolution, has warned that the military retained too much unaccountable power during the transition, that armed militias continue to threaten the establishment of democracy and that Mr Hamdok’s government, which has approached the World Bank for an $8 billion (£6.2bn) loan, has an “external orientation” towards imperialism which will lead to “political, class, social and intellectual conflict and poses a serious threat to the transitional period, even of military coups.”