Female USAID relief worker wounded in ambush in Sudan’s Darfur
KHARTOUM, March 22 (AFP) — A woman working for the US Agency for International Development was shot and wounded while traveling in a relief convoy in western Sudan’s embattled Darfur region, Sudanese and US officials said.
The US State Department also demanded a thorough investigation of the shooting, which it said targeted a clearly marked humanitarian convoy traveling on a road supposed to be safe.
US officials said the woman, an information officer whose named was withheld, was shot in the face but her wounds were not life-threatening. They said plans were under way to evacuate her from Sudan.
The Sudanese foreign ministry said it “deeply regrets the injury of a USAID employee with a bullet when a relief convoy she was traveling in came under fire in an ambush on the Nyala-Kass road.”
The ministry “strongly condemns unjustified attacks on relief convoys and on humanitarian aid workers” and will launch a quick investigation into the shooting and pursue the perpetrators, the statement said.
A myriad of development agencies work in the embattled Darfur where the Sudanese government crackdown on an uprising launched by rebel groups two years ago has left tens of thousands dead and 1.6 million people displaced.
A British man and two Sudanese relief workers were killed in Darfur late last year.
A statement issued in the name of US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she was “deeply saddened” by Tuesday’s incident, the first time a staff member of the Foreign Disaster Assistance Program had been shot.
Deputy State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said it was too early to tell whether the woman, traveling as part of a four-vehicle convoy, was targeted because she is an American.
But he added, “That is certainly one of the issues we will be looking at and we will be encouraging the investigation to focus on.”
“We’ll be paying very close attention to the investigation, so that it answers these obvious questions of why someone on a previously cleared road in a clearly marked vehicle carrying out a humanitarian mission would be the target of gunfire,” Ereli said.
Ereli said the United States had some 20 Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART) specialists in Sudan, including six in Darfur, and they would carry on with their work for the time being.
But he said, “Obviously, this attack raises concerns to us and to everybody, really, about the safety with which we can operate and with which we can carry out our humanitarian mission in Darfur.”