Sudan rebels seek safe way to release Chinese engineer

CAIRO, March 23 (AFP) — The main rebel group in Sudan’s western Darfur region is trying to find a safe way to release a Chinese engineer who has been in its custody since it captured a town, a rebel leader said Tuesday.

In a telephone call to AFP in Cairo, Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) Secretary General Mani Arko Manawi denied the engineer was a hostage and that his group had taken him and another Chinese engineer when it seized control of Buram.

They were keeping the two “out of fear for their safety” but his “colleague fled and we are trying to free the one we’re holding,” said Minawai adding he was speaking from the Darfur region. “He is in good health.”

A Sudanese official reported on Sunday that one of the pair had escaped and that his government was making contacts with the rebels through a third party to secure the release of the second engineer.

However, Minawi said “we want to hand him over to the International Committee of the Red Cross or release him in a safe place, but the government has prevented international humanitarian organizations from entering our areas.”

Sudanese and Chinese sources said the two workers, who were drilling water wells, were abducted by armed militants in an attack on the western city of Buram in South Darfur State on March 13.

The workers were seized on a site eight kilometres (five miles) south of the town. The rebels also stole the workers’ equipment, the sources said.

A Sudanese official said the engineers were working under contract to the government, without specifying whether it had received any demands from the rebels for their release.

A rebellion erupted in the Darfur region in February last year amid charges the central government had neglected the impoverished region on the border with Chad and discriminated against its indigenous non-Arab minorities.

An estimated 3,000 people have died in the conflict, with some 700,000 people displaced within Sudan and 100,000 refugees seeking asylum in Chad.