Asmara on Monday accused the Sudanese leadership of plotting to assassinate Eritrean President Isaias Afeworki, raising the stakes in a months-long series of charges and countercharges.
Khartoum ”continues to step up its attempts to disrupt peace and stability in Eritrea and the region by pursuing its practice of governmental terrorism and assassination attempts against the president,” Eritrean Information Minister Ali Abdu Ahmed said in a statement, without elaborating.
Eritrean security services made a similar accusation in 1997.
Already strained relations between the neighbouring states worsened considerably in 2002, when Khartoum accused Asmara of supporting an offensive by Sudanese rebels on its territory.
The states’ common border has since been closed.
Sudanese opposition groups, some of them armed movements, occasionally hold meetings in Asmara.
Another cause of tension is Sudan’s good relationship with Ethiopia, which fought a border war with Eritrea between 1998 and 2000. The peace process between Eritrea and Ethiopia has stalled.
Recent months were peppered with further signs of bad blood.
Earlier in October, an Eritrean diplomat asked for political asylum in Sudan, protesting what he described as worsening conditions back home, according to a news agency close to the Khartoum government.
On August 27, a Libyan plane carrying 73 Eritreans being forcibly repatriated was hijacked by some its passengers to Sudan, which granted most of them asylum and convicted 15 to five-year jail terms.
Khartoum refused requests to extradite the convicts unless Eritrea agreed to ”hand over Sudanese rebels in Eritrean camps,” while Asmara accused Sudan of ”encouraging terrorism”.
In July, Sudan accused Eritrea of training two rebel groups which took up arms against Khartoum in the now-devastated western region of Darfur in February 2003.
A few weeks earlier, Eritrean state television broadcast the confession of a young man who said a recent bombing that claimed five lives in the western town of Barentu was his doing and that the attack had been planned by a radical Islamic group based in Sudan.
In January, Sudanese authorities closed down two Eritrean community clubs in Khartoum, claiming they were used as cover for a spy ring. – Sapa-AFP