12 May 2009

Khartoum - Gunmen riding camels shot dead three Sudanese police officers in Darfur in an attack aimed at stealing their weapons, a senior police source said on Tuesday, the second attack in the same area in under a week.

"An unknown armed group attacked four policemen yesterday east of Nyala and killed three of them," the source told Reuters by telephone from Darfur. The fourth officer was wounded in the attack, 35km from Nyala in south Darfur.

Law and order have collapsed in Darfur, where UN officials say up to 300 000 people have died and more than 2.7 million have been driven from their homes in almost six years of ethnic and politically driven violence. Khartoum says 10 000 have died.

The attack comes just days after carjackers shot dead an international peacekeeper in Nyala in an attack the United Nations described as a war crime. A Nigerian peacekeeper was killed in the same area in March.

An undermanned joint United Nations and African Union peacekeeping force in Darfur, UNAMID, has found itself caught in the middle of an increasingly chaotic conflict involving bandits, rival tribes, government militias and rebels.

Analysts say they have feared an escalation of violence in the western region after the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Sudan's president on March 4 on charges of masterminding violence there.

Luis Moreno-Ocampo Desperate To Bring Forth Charges Against Al-Bashir

So-called the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court Luis Moreno-Ocampo said on Monday he is confident the court's judges will soon charge Sudan's president with genocide and three Darfur rebels with war crimes.

A three-judge panel at The Hague-based court in March issued a warrant for the arrest of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir on suspicion of war crimes and crimes against humanity for deportations and mass killings in Sudan's western Darfur region.

While they charged Bashir on seven counts of crimes in Darfur, two of the three judges deemed the evidence insufficient to support genocide. In an interview, the prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, said he had clarified the case to the point that it should meet the judges' high evidence threshold.

The Sudanese government has rejected Moreno-Ocampo's charges and is refusing to cooperate with the court. Khartoum has retaliated by expelling 13 foreign and three domestic humanitarian aid agencies, accusing them of collaborating with the ICC.

Despite an international arrest warrant hanging over his head, Bashir has made a point of visiting several countries that have voiced opposition to the ICC indictment, including Qatar, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Egypt.