A man who escaped the last functioning hospital in the Sudanese city of el-Fasher before a reported massacre by paramilitary troops says he has lost all hope and happiness.
I have lost my colleagues, Abdu-Rabbu Ahmed, a laboratory technician at the Saudi Maternity Hospital, told the BBC.
I have lost the people whose faces I used to see smiling... It feels as if you lost a big part of your body or your soul.
He was speaking to us from a displaced persons camp in Tawila some 70km (43 miles) to the west of el-Fasher, the regional hub which was taken over by paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in the last week of October after an 18-month siege.
The RSF has been fighting the Sudanese army since April 2023, when a power struggle between their leaders erupted into a civil war.
The alleged killings of at least 460 patients and their companions at the Saudi Hospital were one of the most shocking among widespread accounts of atrocities - some of them filmed by RSF fighters and posted to social media.
In a statement of condemnation, the World Health Organization (WHO) said it was appalled and deeply shocked by the reported shootings, and by the abductions of six health workers - four doctors, a nurse and a pharmacist.
The RSF has dismissed the accusations as disinformation, declaring that all of el-Fasher's hospitals had been abandoned. It disputed the claims by filming a video inside the hospital grounds showing female volunteers tending to patients.
A freelancer based in Tawila gathered interviews for the BBC.
Mr. Ahmed told him he had carried on working at Saudi Hospital since the beginning of the war, despite regular shelling by artillery, tanks and drones - which destroyed parts of the buildings and injured doctors and nurses as well as patients.
Medical staff used to share what little food was available as the RSF blockade tightened, he said, sometimes working without breakfast or lunch.
Most of them fled when the paramilitary fighters launched their final assault.
The shelling started around six in the morning, Mr. Ahmed said. All civilians and soldiers headed out towards the southern side. There was a state of terror, and as we walked, drones were bombing us. And heavy artillery too - I saw many people die on the spot, there was no-one who could save them.
Mr. Ahmed said some of the fleeing medical workers arrived with him in Tawila, but many were detained in locations north-west of the city. Some were transferred to Nyala, he said, the RSF's de facto capital in South Darfur.
Mr. Ahmed also lost much of his family: a sister and two brothers were killed that day, and his parents are missing.
I am very worried about the fate of the people inside el-Fasher, he added. They may be killed. And they may be used as human shields against the [Sudanese air force] airstrikes.
Accounts of the alleged hospital massacre were reported by two Sudanese doctors' groups, citing sources on the ground, and an el-Fasher activist network. Yale University's Humanitarian Research Lab said satellite imagery corroborated the reports, apparently showing blood on the ground and white grouped objects that looked like bodies in the hospital compound.
BBC Verify has authenticated footage filmed at the nearby University of El-Fasher's Faculty of Medical Laboratory Sciences: it shows bodies lying on the floor and an RSF fighter shooting one of the men still alive.
Back in Tawila, Mohamed Abdu-Teia, who had been a patient at the Saudi Hospital when the RSF closed in, can do little else but lay on the ground with his leg in a tattered cast. He managed to flee the city on foot the morning of the final RSF assault.
Many children arrived at the Tawila camps without parents. Fifteen-year-old Eman was one of them. Her father was killed in a drone strike in el-Fasher, she told the BBC, and her mother and brother were detained by the RSF as they fled.
Survivors have detailed horrific stories of gang rapes and the abduction of young girls. Female survivors recounted being stabbed and assaulted as they attempted to escape the impending violence.
Dr. Elsheikh of the Sudan Doctors Network dismissed the RSF videos as propaganda, stating that the real horror of the situation is the suffering of the people caught in the conflict.
In the end, Mr. Ahmed knows too much about the truth of what has transpired, leaving him devoid of hope for the future in el-Fasher.
