Two Sudanese aid workers killed in attack

KHARTOUM, May 3 (Reuters) – Two Sudanese aid workers were killed and one was kidnapped after their vehicle was attacked in eastern Sudan, the Sudanese Red Crescent said on Tuesday.

Rebels from Sudan’s Eastern Front parade during a conference held by the Front north of Kassala town, near the Eritrean border. (AFP).

People in the country’s poor east suffer from drought and periodic hunger but get little international attention. A small rebel group, from the non-Arab Beja tribe, are active in the region near the Eritrean border, but fighting is sporadic and on a small scale.

“They were on their way from al-Aboudi camp … near the Sudanese-Eritrean border … when they were attacked by gunmen,” said Red Crescent spokeswoman Afaf Bukhari.

She said two people were killed, a third was seriously injured and one other person was abducted in the attack, which took place on Sunday.

Bukhari said the Sudanese army had retrieved the aid workers’ vehicle and had identified the attackers as one man from Darfur, in Sudan’s remote west, and four others from an eastern Arab tribe.

But they had not yet caught them and the kidnapped worker was still missing.

Rebels from Darfur, which is in its third year of open revolt, have bases in the Eritrean capital, and Sudan has accused them of having training camps near the eastern border with Eritrea.

The eastern Beja Congress rebels have carried out minor operations to block the main road linking Sudan’s only easten port, Port Sudan, and the capital. They have also disrupted flow of oil from the Khartoum refinery to the port, although only on a small scale.

The rebels accuse the Arab-dominated central government of neglect and of giving preferential treatment to Arab tribes.

During the border wars between Eritrea and Ethiopia, thousands of Eritrean refugees camped in Sudan along the border. The Sudanese Red Crescent works with refugees there.