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KHARTOUM: About 60 people were killed and 21 wounded
in an attack on an Arab tribe in the war-torn Darfur region of
western Sudan, the victims’ relatives said on Sunday.
“We buried 23 people on
Saturday and then during the night another 37 bodies were left in
the morgue of Nyala hospital” in southern Darfur, Mohammed Hammad
Jalali, a chief of the targeted Torjam tribe, told AFP by telephone.
Thirteen people wounded are being
treated in the provincial capital of Nyala and another eight in the
nearby town of Kas, he said.
Tribal members say gunmen riding
camels and donkeys swooped down on their villages to steal
livestock.
Abdel Rahman Hasaballah, also
from the Torjam tribe, backed up the casualty figures and added the
relatives were refusing to retrieve the corpses and had assembled in
front of provincial offices to demand better protection.
The Torjam are blaming the attack
on the Janjaweed militia, often used by Sudanese authorities against
a rebellion raging in the region for the past four years.
Local officials quoted by the
press, however, said it was the work of a rival Arab tribe in the
region, the Rzigat Aballa.
“We think the Rzigat Aballa is
responsible for the attack because it occurred in the area of recent
clashes between the two tribes,” said Mohammed al-Ajeb, adding
some 500 heads of cattle had been seized and driven northwest.
Authorities had negotiated a
truce between the two tribes in February after several earlier
confrontations.
Envoys from the United Nations
and African Union on their last visits to Khartoum bidding to find a
peaceful solution to the Darfur crisis warned against tribal
rivalries complicating the search for peace.
Since the outbreak of hostilities
in the vast Darfur region in 2003, some 200,000 people have been
killed and 2.5 million displaced in the fighting, according to UN
estimates. Some sources say the death toll is much higher.
A 2006 peace agreement with one
rebel faction has failed to halt the fighting with splinter groups
continuing to battle government forces and Janjaweed militia groups.
 --AFP
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