Sudan plane bombs Chad side of border, residents say
By Matthew Green
N’DJAMENA, Jan 29 (Reuters) – A Sudanese warplane attacking rebels in the west bombed the Chadian side of the border on Thursday in a rare spillover into Chad of a war in Sudan’s remote Darfur region, aid workers and local residents said.
Sonia Peyrassol, emergency coordinator for the Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF) medical charity in eastern Chad, said a man and his two-year-old daughter were killed and 15 people, four of them children, were wounded in the bombing.
“It was a Sudanese plane. We heard the explosions as it dropped the bombs this morning,” Peyrassol told Reuters, adding local authorities had reported that the dead and wounded in the frontier town of Tine were Chadian.
“Suddenly they started to bomb several times in rapid succession. It was very close,” added Peyrassol, who works in a hospital in Tine.
There was no immediate comment from the Sudanese or Chadian governments about the incident in Tine, which straddles the border.
Two main rebel groups launched a revolt in the Darfur region of western Sudan last February, accusing the Khartoum government of sidelining the poor area.
Fighting has intensified since peace talks with one group collapsed last month, and thousands have been uprooted and fled to neighboring Chad.
Peyrassol said the bombs had landed in the middle of the Chadian section of Tine near a market, but Helene Caux, a spokeswoman for the U.N. refugee agency in eastern Chad, cited local officials as saying it had landed in the suburbs of Tine’s Chadian section.
“According to the prefect of Tine there were seven explosions at around 10 a.m. (4 a.m. EST) in the Red Hill area which is located in the suburbs of Tine, Chad,” she said. “The local authorities informed us that a 28-year-old-man and his two-year-old child were killed in the explosions.”
Red Hill is one several camps for Sudanese refugees dotted around Tine. It lies two to three km (one-two miles) north of the center of the town and hosts at least 1,000 recently arrived Sudanese refugees.
Peyrassol reported local residents as saying that Sudanese army troops on Thursday entered the Sudanese section of Tine. Sudanese troops were not in the town when a team of international journalists visited Tine earlier in the week.
Residents say it is rare for Sudanese bombardments in Darfur to spill over into Chad, but it has happened periodically.
One resident said a Sudanese helicopter gunship killed eight Chadian soldiers and one Chadian civilian in late December in a spillover of an attack onto the Chadian side of the border at a town called Bessa.