Exclusive Guardian investigation finds companies set up by people sanctioned by US hired Colombian fighters for Rapid Support Forces, widely suspected of war crimes in Sudan
Close to Tottenham Hotspur’s shiny football stadium in London is a squat, nondescript block of flats. It holds a grim secret beyond the unremarkable beige brickwork – a cramped, second-floor apartment in the British capital, linked to murderous atrocities unfolding 3,000 miles south.
The one-bedroom flat off north London’s Creighton Road is, according to UK government records, tied to a transnational network of companies involved in the mass recruitment of mercenaries to fight in Sudan alongside paramilitaries accused of myriad war crimes and genocide.
Hundreds of former Colombian military personnel have been enlisted to fight with Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group responsible for mass rapes, ethnic slaughter and the systematic killing of women and children.
Colombian mercenaries were directly involved in the paramilitaries’ seizure of the south-western Sudanese city of El Fasher in late October, which prompted a killing frenzy that analysts say has cost at least 60,000 lives.
