Sudan charges 15 Eritrean deportees over Libyan plane hijacking

KHARTOUM, Aug 29 (AFP) — Sudanese prosecutors have charged 15 Eritrean emigrants over Friday’s hijacking of a Libyan military aircraft that was forcibly repatriating them, court officials said Sunday.

They stand accused of terrorism and membership of an organized criminal gang, the officials said.

It had intially been reported that just four of the 73 Eritreans being deported to Asmara had taken part in the hijacking, which only ended after lengthy negotiations by Sudan’s deputy police chief and members of the Khartoum-based Eritrean opposition.

The others, who included six children and 22 women, were unwitting bystanders in the operation to force the C-130 transport aircraft down in Khartoum amid human rights watchdog reports of imprisonment and even torture of returning deportees by the Eritrean regime, officials here had said.

Sudan has frosty relations with Eritrea, which it accuses of backing rebels in Darfur and the east and south.

But the authorities here have insisted throughout that their decision to allow the hijacked plane to land was a purely humanitarian one.

Deputy police chief General Sayyed El-Hussein Osman said on Friday that all 73 deportees had been taken into custody but the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees announced in Geneva that UN officials were also involved in interviewing them.

The deportation of the Eritreans from Libya, which coincided with that of a large group of Nigerians, followed a visit to Tripoli by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in which he pressed Moamer Kadhafi’s regime to do more to stem the flow of illegal migrants to Europe through his country.

New York-based advocacy group Human Rights Watch had written to Kadhafi personally in July pressing him not to go ahead with deportations to Asmara given the record of President Issaias Afeworki’s regime.