Western Sudan rebels deny kidnapping missing aid workers

AL-FASHER, Sudan, Aug 31, 2004 (AP) — The secretary-general of the rebel Sudan Liberation Army, Minni Minnawi, Tuesday denied that the rebels had kidnapped eight aid workers.

Sudanese officials charged that the aid workers – three from the U.N. World Food Program and five from the Sudanese Red Crescent – had been kidnapped by rebels waging an 18-month insurgency against the government.

“We ourselves suspect the government, and the Janjaweed. The area in which they were kidnapped is not in our control. It is in the control of the government and there are many Janjaweed in that area,” he told The Associated Press in Abuja, Nigeria, where rebels and government officials were participating in peace talks.

The Janjaweed are an Arab militia accused of gross human rights abuses in Darfur. Human rights groups, the U.S. Congress and U.N. officials accuse the government of backing the Janjaweed, a charge the government denies.

U.N. security officers searched on the ground and by helicopter for the Sudanese aid workers missing in the western Darfur region, officials said earlier Tuesday.

WFP officials weren’t prepared to immediately call the aid workers’ disappearance a kidnapping.

“We simply do not know what has happened to them,” Marcus Prior, the agency’s spokesman in Khartoum told The Associated Press.

The region south of al-Fasher where the workers went missing has in the past two years seen fierce fighting between government forces and the Sudan Liberation Army, one of two African rebel factions that took up arms in February 2003 claiming discrimination by the Arab-dominated government in the capital Khartoum.