Sudan says arrested officers reluctant over orders
By Nima Elbagir
KHARTOUM, April 5 (Reuters) – A group of mainly Sudanese air force officers showed reluctance to follow orders to carry out aerial bombardments before their arrests for plotting against the state, a Sudanese official said on Monday.
President adviser Qutbi al-Mahdi did not say where the officers had been ordered to bomb, but witnesses have said government planes have in recent weeks raided several civilian areas in Sudan’s war-torn western region of Darfur.
A senior military official previously said the group, now numbering 11 after another colonel was arrested on Sunday, mainly came from Darfur. He also said they received funds from rebels in the remote west of Africa’s largest country.
The military official, who had asked not to be named, said the men were plotting a coup, aiming to assassinate high-level officials and blow up economic targets.
“Whenever they were given orders regarding bombardments of a given area they used delaying tactics with a lot of excuses… In the end they were arrested for the sabotage attempt,” Mahdi said, adding they sometimes said planes were not ready.
Earlier this month, the United Nations appealed to the world to end what it said was an organised campaign of ethnic cleansing of black Africans by Arab militias in western Sudan and accused the government of doing little to stop it.
In his first reference to the arrests, most of which were made at the end of March, Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir said in a speech on Monday: “While we are exerting efforts to solve the conflict in Darfur, a faction objected and wanted to revive the fighting in Darfur.”
Rebels in the west, who took up arms against the government more than year ago, accuse Khartoum of neglecting the region and of arming Arab militias to attack African villages. The government calls the militias outlaws.
The Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), the two rebel groups in the area, began peace talks with the government in Chad on March 30.
A government official said on Monday the talks were heading for an impasse over rebel demands for an international presence to monitor a ceasefire, which he said Khartoum would not accept.
JEM had earlier said it planned to quit the talks from Monday after saying Chad authorities had refused to grant its political delegation entry visas. But the government official and an SLM official said JEM was still present on Monday.
JEM officials were not available for comment.