Sudanese newspaper’s print-run impounded over “false report”

KHARTOUM, July 29 (AFP) — The entire print-run of Tuesday’s edition of Sudnan’s independent daily newspaper Al-Sahafa was confiscated as it rolled off the presses Monday night, a newspaper executive said.

The newspaper was impounded by security authorities for having published a report on Monday regarded as baseless by the authorities, executive Al-Haj Warraq said.

It had claimed that 12 student army recruits were killed and 31 others injured when a bus they were travelling in overturned.

The spokesman for Sudan’s National Military Service spokesman denied the accident report as “absolutely untrue and baseless”.

Spokesman Abdel Qadir Imam, was quoted by the official Al Anbaa daily as saying that no such accident had occurred anywhere in the country.

Warraq said editor-in-chief Adel Al-Baz, who was summoned Tuesday by the authorities, was also told that the confiscation was imposed when it was found the paper was to publish in Tuesday’s edition a report on a tribal delegation that had returned from negotiations with Darfur rebels.

Khartoum halted peace talks to end the six-month-old war with the rebel Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) on Thursday.

The SLM was founded in Darfur in August 2001 under the name of the Darfur Liberation Movement, before using its current name in February when it began claiming responsibility for several anti-government attacks.

The government had previously refused to acknowledge any political motivation for the unrest among the sedentary peoples of North, South and West Darfur states, blaming it instead on “armed criminal gangs and outlaws”.