|
12th May, 2008
KHARTOUM: Sudan on Sunday cut diplomatic ties with Chad, accusing its neighbour of backing a first ever Darfur rebel attack on Khartoum as the government partially lifted a curfew to clamp down on rebels.
The government said it had repulsed the assault by the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), allegedly backed by Ndjamena, which saw the insurgents reach Khartoum’s outskirts with the declared intent of toppling the regime.
“We are forced to sever diplomatic relations with this regime” in Chad, President Omar al-Beshir said on state television following the attack on the capital’s twin city of Omdurman just across the river Nile from Khartoum.
“We place the entire responsibility for this attack on Chad,” he said after returning from Muslim pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia and swapping traditional white robes for his field marshall’s military uniform.
Police spokesman Major General Mohamed Abduil Majeed said a curfew had been lifted in Khartoum but remained in force in Omdurman until further notice.
The Egyptian news agency MENA said Khartoum international airport was closed for security reasons.
Remnant rebel forces were still in a number of residential areas in Omdurman, and the corpses of dead rebels, arms and explosives were being rounded up, the police spokesman told Sudan’s official SUNA news agency.
The rebels “are now either dead or prisoners of war,” army spokesman Brigadier General Osman al-Aghbash told public radio.
The army said that “most of those who fell into our hands were Chadian,” and that they numbered around 100. “There are certainly dead and wounded, but we can’t say how many,” a spokesman said.
JEM’s deputy chief of staff Suleiman Sandal said that his forces had taken Omdurman but were having trouble with the urban fighting environment having come from the desert of Darfur, and had suffered deaths and injuries.
“We attacked Omdurman yesterday and we took over all Omdurman and besieged the Sudan government troops,” Sandal, who said he was still in Omdurman, told AFP by telephone.
“Our troops came from Darfur,” he said. “This is the first time for them to fight in towns and now we are gathering our troops and thinking about what we’re doing.”
He said his forces were prevented from crossing a key bridge into Khartoum overnight after taking three days to drive from Darfur in a convoy of 400 vehicles in order to depose the regime. – AFP
|
