“It came very close,” he said. “You can see them shooting each other and we were in the middle, driving.

“For them,” pointing at Lena, 7, Ahmed, 9, and Danya, 15, “it was very scary”.

In the Commons, James Cleverly defended the Foreign Office’s advice to citizens caught in the country.

He said it was better to give general advice for how to navigate through Sudan to the evacuation point because specific advice can go out of date very quickly and put recipients in danger.

“The travel advice that we give has to enhance the safety of British nationals overseas and not inadvertently put them at a greater risk.

“And there is often a lag – there is a lag between us finding out information, broadcasting that information, and that information acted upon, and one of the things that we have seen, not directly because of advice the UK has given, but the advice that other governments have given, is that they have inadvertently called people into more dangerous circumstances and those people have found themselves under attack, so we have to give general advice.”

‘You hear gunfire everywhere’

In Cyprus, the stories of terror and near misses were shared among British passport holders who had made it to safety.

Elfatih Abdelrahman, 61, a business owner and father-of-five who lives in Manchester, was also sceptical about the ceasefire.

Describing his flight from Omdurman to the airstrip, he said: “We were afraid because anytime they might tell you to stop, and if you don’t, they might shoot you.

“Luckily, we were told to just keep going each time.

“You hear gunfire everywhere, even when we were at the airbase we heard gunfire from outside in the distance.”

Meanwhile, Giles Lever, the British ambassador to Sudan, has been relocated from London to Ethiopia in order to lead diplomatic efforts to end the fighting in Sudan, the Foreign Office has said.

Mr Lever, who was not in Sudan when the violence broke out, had been working in the crisis centre in London.