Insurgents killed three Sudanese policemen in an ambush in the country’s troubled Darfur region, a police chief said on Wednesday.
Members of an insurgent splinter faction launched the ambush in south Darfur on Monday, and Sudanese police and soldiers responded by attacking three rebel camps on Tuesday and took 34 prisoners, a police chief told Reuters.
Violence has subsided somewhat since the early years of the six-year conflict, but low-level clashes between security forces, rebel factions and bandits have persisted, hampering efforts to bring aid to 4,7-million people caught up in the fighting.
The armed men opened fire on the police convoy on Monday afternoon, close to the settlement of Dogi, 60km north of Nyala, the capital of south Darfur and killed a senior officer and two policemen, said police commissioner for the surrounding Al-Wihdah district, Al-Nur Jabir.
The attackers, who stole a police vehicle, were from a breakaway faction of the rebel Sudan Liberation Army, Jabir told Reuters. No one from the insurgent faction was immediately available to comment.
”The police and the Sudanese armed forces then went after this group … and attacked three of their camps,” he said, adding the clashes in the eastern Jebal Marra area continued for more than four hours on Tuesday afternoon.
The Darfur conflict began in 2003 when Sudan Liberation Army and Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) rebels took up arms against the government, accusing it of neglecting the region.
Insurgents have since splintered and the fighting has descended into a free-for-all also involving rival tribes, armed robbers and militias.
Estimates of Darfur’s total death toll range from 10 000 according to the Khartoum government, to up to 300 000 according to the United Nation’s humanitarian chief John Holmes.
According to figures published online by Sudan expert Alex de Waal, 50 people died in violent incidents in Darfur in August; 22 of them in criminal acts including bandit attacks. Fighting between JEM and government forces in north Darfur in early August killed 19 people according to the report. — Reuters