Omar al Bashir: Tyrant's prosecution may be all Sudan's warring parties agree on

Sudan's former president Omar al Bashir faces charges of corruption and possession of foreign currency.

Sky's Africa correspondent John Sparks was in Khartoum to see his first public appearance since being deposed by the military.

It came as something of a surprise: a call about a military convoy that we had been invited to join.

But there were a couple of problems.

First, we were given 10 minutes to get to Khartoum's grand Republican Palace to meet the men who would lead the convoy.

Second, we had absolutely no idea where it was going.

We travelled to the palace at breakneck speed and found the convoy forming inside the gates. Pick-up trucks packed with soldiers surrounded our car and the vehicles of a handful of Sudanese journalists. Within minutes we had crossed the Nile, carving through the morning traffic with dozens of men equipped with rocket-launchers.

Our destination was an ageing prison called the Kober jail. It was built by the British in a bygone age and it has earned itself notoriety.

This is where Sudan keeps its political prisoners and dissenters - and this is where the country's ruling military council have decided to stick the ex-president.

His name is Omar Hassan Ahmad al Bashir - a brigadier who took power in a coup in 1989. He ran the country with an iron fist, issuing purges and ordering executions - or jailing his enemies at Kober prison. The irony will not be lost on the inmates and guards.

The generals made their move against the president in early April after months of vigorous public protest. The economy had deteriorated and the opposition was enraged. They were also well-led by a coalition of professional and civil associations.

Now it is the military men who are the focus of the protesters' anger. Negotiations over a new civilian administration collapsed after the security forces cleared the demonstrators' main 'sit-in' on 3 June. A Sudanese doctors' committee says 118 people were killed, with the bodies of 40 dumped in the Nile River.

The prosecution of Omar al Bashir may be the only thing that both parties in Sudan agree on. Certainly, it does the military no harm to begin his prosecution.

That is probably why we found ourselves delivered to the door of Kober prison in 42-degree heat.

We got our pictures of the 75-year-old former tyrant as he exited under guard and he looked clean and well-fed in his robes. It was his first public appearance in nine weeks - a trip to the acting state prosecutor to answer charges of corruption and possession of foreign currency.

It seems the music has stopped for the man the Sudanese call "the dancer" but the question of succession is anything but solved.