Darfur: five of 29 missing medical aid workers found safe

NAIROBI, Dec 24 (AFP) — Five of the 29 employees of aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF – Doctors Without Borders) missing in Sudan’s Darfur region following recent fighting have been found safe, MSF said on Friday.

Displaced Sudanese people walk past a Medecins Sans Frontieres MSF center at the Kalma refugee camp near Nyala town in Sudan’s southern Darfur region.bmp. (AFP).

“Five more staff have been found. Twenty-four Sudanese MSF workers who fled fighting in Labado are unaccounted for,” MSF said in a statement released in Nairobi.

“They said that they fled into the bush, but they later managed to find a way to establish contacts with MSF. They do not know the whereabouts of the other 24,” an MSF official told AFP in Nairobi.

MSF said named Mohammed Salih Bosh as its employee who was shot dead on November 17 when Sudanese government troops attacked the town of Labado.

Darfur has been embroiled in conflict since February last year, when rebels from the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) and Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) launched a revolt against Khartoum, claiming the Arab-led Islamic government in Khartoum had marginalised and persecuted the region’s black African tribes.

In that region, pro-government militia, known as Janjaweed, have attacked communities, murdering and raping tens of thousands of civilians and driving more than 1.6 million from their homes, according to United Nations estimates.

UN has described the scale of disaster in the resource-rich region, the size of France, as the world’s worst humanitarian disaster.