Sudan admits to UN shooting
2008-01-10 20:42
Khartoum - Sudan admitted on Thursday that its troops shot at a United Nations convoy in Darfur reversing an initial denial, but it in part blamed the peacekeepers saying they should have notified Khartoum of their movements.
The Sudanese government has demanded that the joint UN-African Union peacekeeping force give it prior notification for all its movements and not move at night, conditions the UN has rejected.
UN officials have accused Khartoum of trying to limit the abilities of the force or hold up its full deployment with a series of bureaucratic obstacles, including such conditions.
The attack on Monday night in West Darfur damaged an armoured personnel carrier, destroyed a fuel tanker truck and severely injured a Sudanese driver.
The UN has lodged a complaint with Khartoum and said "the government of Sudan has to provide unequivocal guarantees that there will be no recurrence of such activities by its forces".
Sudan's military spokesperson and its ambassador to the UN initially denied the army had opened fire.
But the military retracted the statements on Thursday, saying the shoot-out did take place. It apologised for the error, which it said occurred because the UN force, known as UNAMID, had not given forward notice it was sending a convoy through this volatile zone of western Darfur near the border with Chad.
"The Western Sudan military command has provided an apology to the representative of UNAMID in the region and that the apology was accepted, in recognition of the dual mistake committed," the state-run SUNA news agency said.
Sudan's Defence Minister Abdel-Rahim Mohamed Hussein told the independent daily Al-Sahafa the army first fired warning shots at the UN convoy. "Those shots were ignored and that's when the soldiers opened fire, wounding the driver and damaging a troop carrier and a truck," Hussein said.
The UN mission began on January 1 and now stands at around 9 000 peacekeepers. It is supposed to grow to 26 000 and aims at finally deploying a robust force to stop the chaos.
More than 200 000 people have died in Darfur and 2.5 million fled to refugee camps since 2003 when ethnic African rebels took arms against the Arab-dominated Sudanese government, accusing it of discrimination.
Sudan denies multiple allegations of war crimes in the region and is now accused of obstructing the deployment of the new UN force.
- AP