Sudanese women's rights activist Amira Osman has been released by the authorities after being held incommunicado for two weeks.

Ms Osman, who is a trained engineer, a member of the Sudanese Communist Party, and head of the rights group No to Women’s Oppression, had been taken from her house in the middle of the night by armed men in plain clothes on 22 January 2022.

The detention was justified under the emergency laws declared by the junta following October's coup.

According to a petition submitted on Sunday to the attorney general, Ms Osman’s lawyers argued that her detention and subsequent transfer to the women’s prison in Omdurman were illegal and violated her rights even under the state of emergency.

Activists warn that these increased unlawful detentions by the secret police mean a return to the days of the military dictatorship of President Omar el-Bashir; the secret police, then called National Intelligence and Security Services (NISS), became infamous in the 1990s for its so-called "ghost houses".

Sudanese journalist Zeinab Mohammed Salih writes that this “is yet another sign that things are going back to how they used to be, before Bashir's overthrow led to a belief that a different Sudan was possible".