Thousands of police, troops surround Sudan camp

By Mohamed Noureldin and Nancy Abdallah

SOBA ARADI, Sudan, May 24 (Reuters) – Thousands of police and soldiers conducted house to house searches and made arrests in a Sudanese refugee camp south of Khartoum on Tuesday, where at least 17 police and residents died in clashes last week.

Sudan’s State Minister of Interior Ahmed Mohamed Haroon told reporters 50 camp residents were arrested in an operation that began early Tuesday May 24, 2005 in connection with last week’s violence, which left 14 policemen and three civilians dead. (AP) .

At least 6,000 soldiers and 400 police officers sealed off the area, about 30 km (19 miles) south of the Sudanese capital Khartoum, and arrested 50 people in connection with the deaths of 14 policemen in the violence last week.

Another 32 people were arrested for looting and burning the camp police station, the police chief of Khartoum state, Tariq Othman, told reporters on Tuesday.

Clashes erupted last week when Sudanese police tried to relocate refugees away from the camp.

Officials said only three civilians were killed and the police did not open fire. But the residents of the camp said the police did open fire and up to 17 civilians died.

Slums and camps surrounding the sprawling capital are home to more than 2 million people, mostly southerners displaced by two decades of civil war.

The slum areas around Khartoum have little or no running water or electricity and aid agencies have found it difficult to improve the situation there.

Khartoum authorities say they want to demolish the slums to relocate residents to permanent, planned housing plots.

But the United Nations criticizes the policy, saying the authorities have failed to consult the people being moved, and that refugees were being moved to desert areas far from the capital and where there are no services.

HUNT FOR “CRIMINAL ACTIVITY”

Khartoum’s governor, Abdul Haleem Mutafi, told Reuters police on Tuesday were looking for a list of people they suspected of stealing weapons and other “criminal activity.”

“This is nothing to do with the transfer of people. This is related to the security in the area. There are so many criminals in Soba Aradi,” he said.

Reuters witnesses said the police were heavily armed, with machine guns mounted on many of the vehicles. The police were searching homes and had beaten some people before taking them away.

A Reuters photographer, a driver and a BBC correspondent were released from police custody after being beaten and detained. The three men suffered bruising.

Security officials had said the detentions were a mistake, but deleted the photos taken by the Reuters photographer.

Othman said the police operations had resulted in the arrests of wanted men and the retrieval of weapons.

“Weapons covered with blood were found … These included knives and swords,” he said.

At least 82 people had been arrested to date and probably many more, Othman said, for various crimes.

The over 6,400-strong force would move on in the coming days to other shanty town areas around Khartoum, said Ahmed Haroun, a minister of state at the Ministry of Interior.