(Corr)- More than 100 bodies collected after Malakal fighting
(Correcting headline from “Rumbek” to ” Malakal fighting”. A corrected version of the item follows)
Dec 2, 2006 (KHARTOUM) — Police and aid workers recovered more than 100 bodies by midday Saturday in the streets of the South Sudan town of Malakal where former rebels and government forces violently clashed this week, aid workers said.
The situation remained too tense to deliver relief aid to the town, where a high-ranking delegation of government, rebel and United Nations officials arrived Thursday to contain the crisis after days of heavy fighting between the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement and government forces.
On Saturday, U.N. and aid workers along with police began recovering corpses strewn throughout the streets of Malakal, which lies about 640 kilometers (400 miles) south of Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, in the Upper Nile state.
“At least 110 bodies have been collected so far,” Chris Imana told The Associated Press by the telephone from Malakal. Imana, the area coordinator for the Christian aid group World Vision, said there were still many corpses to recover.
Most of the dead appeared to be combatants from both sides, but at least two dozen appeared to be civilians, Imana said.
Aid workers said the fighting began when a militia allied to the government tried to kill a local SPLM commander. The former SPLM rebels then retaliated against the town’s army commander. Clashes evolved into large-scale battles on Tuesday, with artillery barrages, tanks and armored personnel carriers battling in downtown Malakal, a town of about 150,000 people.
U.N. peacekeepers were deployed in the town, and life was slowly returning to normal by Saturday, the aid workers said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media.
In New York, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan was “deeply concerned about the reports of heavy fighting,” between the army and the former rebels, his spokesman Stephane Dujarric said earlier this week.
A January 2005 peace deal ended 21 years of civil war between north and south Sudan, but the situation in Malakal has remained volatile. The port town, which lies on the Nile river close to Sudan’s richest oil fields, is located next to the north-south boundary.
Nonessential U.N. staff and most aid workers have been evacuated.
The U.N. has some 10,000 peacekeepers in south Sudan to monitor the peace agreement and help reconstruct the ravaged region.
The clashes in Malakal “constitute a serious violation of the security arrangements” under the peace deal, Annan’s spokesman said.
The U.N. said it could not confirm any death toll, but would investigate causalities in what appeared to be one of the gravest breaches of the 2005 cease-fire.
(AP)