Darfur rebels accused the Sudanese government of bombing a Darfur water station on Saturday and said militiamen and soldiers shot dead four people in a village elsewhere in the country’s war-ravaged west.
A Sudanese army spokesperson denied the military had been involved in any incident in either place. A spokesperson for African Union peacekeepers in Darfur said he was checking the report.
Jar el-Neby Abdel Karim, commander of a breakaway arm of the Sudan Liberation Movement that is not a signatory to a 2006 peace accord, said a government Antonov plane had dropped about 15 shells near a water station in Malam al-Hoj, about 150km south of el-Fasher.
”They fired on civilians. One citizen was killed and four were wounded,” he said, speaking to Reuters via satellite phone from Darfur.
Abdel Karim said that Janjaweed militia men and government troops in 12 vehicles and riding horses and camels had also attacked a village in West Darfur earlier in the day, killing four people in Abu Surouj south of Jebel Moon.
The Sudanese army spokesperson dismissed reports of an attack near Jebel Moon: ”The Sudanese military conducted ordinary patrols, but there were no clashes.”
He said the incident could have been a tribal clash, and that the rebels were wrongly blaming the government. He also denied that a government plane had shelled the Malam area.
The United Nations says 200 000 people have been killed and more than two million displaced in ethnic and political conflict in Darfur that flared in 2003 when rebels took up arms against the government. An AU peacekeeping force of 7 000 has so far failed to quell the violence.
Rights groups accuse Khartoum of arming Arab Janjaweed militias, blamed for a host of atrocities in the region, to quell the rebellion. Khartoum denies supporting the Janjaweed, calling them outlaws.
Sudan’s government has agreed to a UN ”heavy support package” for Darfur of about 3 500 military personnel. But Khartoum has not approved a ”hybrid” UN-AU force of more than 20 000 troops and police approved by the world body as necessary to stem violence in Darfur. — Reuters