Sudan: 70 troops believed killed, 120 missing in attack

JUBA, Sudan -- Seventy northern Sudanese troops were killed and more than 120 are missing from an attack last week by southern Sudanese forces near the disputed region of Abyei, a Sudanese diplomat said Tuesday, describing a toll that if verified marks one of the bloodiest clashes since the end of Sudan's civil war.

A U.N. spokesman said he believed the casualty numbers were much smaller.

The south voted to secede from Sudan, Africa's largest country, this year but the future of the 4,000-square-mile Abyei region, which lies near the north-south border, was left in doubt. The fighting that began last Thursday threatens to unravel a 2005 peace deal and reignite a civil war that left more than 2 million people dead.

According to the U.N., southern troops started the clash Thursday by attacking a column of northern troops and U.N. peacekeepers who were moving away from Abyei. The U.N. condemned the attack. A U.N. spokeswoman, Hua Jiang, said Tuesday that no U.N. troops were killed.

Kamal Ismail Saeed, Sudan's ambassador to Kenya, told a news conference in Nairobi that 197 northern troops were killed or missing after the southern attack. A more detailed statement from his embassy said 70 troops were killed and more than 120 others were missing.

Saeed said the attack caused the Sudanese Armed Forces, or SAF, to respond.

"I think that was a serious blow which ended the continuous patience and self restraint of SAF, so it responded in self-defense," Saeed said.

But U.N. spokesman Martin Nesirky told reporters at U.N. headquarters in New York that the casualty figures could be lower than reported.

"I think that the numbers are much smaller than that according to the reporting that I've seen but ... I don't know that we have a concrete actual toll," Nesirky said.

He said he understood that once the attack took place "many people in the convoy dispersed and I don't know that they have been accounted for. If we could get more details, certainly we would want to do that. Clearly, the Sudanese armed forces themselves would want to account for their own people."

Nesirky also said the U.N. has asked for answers from the southern government.

"We've asked the government of South Sudan to launch an investigation immediately and hold the perpetrators accountable as attacks on U.N. peacekeepers constitutes war crimes under international law," he said.

He said the U.N. was conducting "more robust and aggressive patrolling" of the region's main town, also called Abyei, with the support of armored personnel carriers and aerial patrols. He added that 125 U.N. peacekeepers from a reserve company were being airlifted to Abyei on Tuesday.

Northern troops have moved south through Abyei, sending thousands of civilians fleeing. Buildings in the region's Abyei town have been torched. The U.N. estimated on Tuesday that 25,000 to 30,000 people have fled.

The U.N. mission in Sudan said gunmen were burning and looting in Abyei town on Monday and called on the Sudanese Armed Forces to intervene to "stop these criminal acts." In photos provided by the U.N., some huts appeared to be ablaze and smoke billowed from others as rifle-toting looters roamed the streets. Some pulled carts carrying mats, pots and pans, sacks of grain and even bed frames.

Col. Philip Aguer, a spokesman for the southern military, said Tuesday that northern troops remain north of a river seen as the dividing line between north and south, but he warned that if they cross over that would constitute a violation that the south "cannot tolerate."

Both north and south claim Abyei, a fertile region that's almost the size of Connecticut and is located near several large oil fields. The south voted in January to secede from the north in a referendum promised in a 2005 peace deal that ended more than two decades of north-south civil war.

A referendum on Abyei's future was supposed to have been held simultaneously, but the two sides could never agree on who was eligible to vote, and Abyei's referendum wasn't held. The ethnic African tribe of the Ngok Dinka, which is mostly southern-based, and the Arab tribe of Misseriah both lay claim to the area.

"What has transpired is a grave risk to peace and stability," said Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. She called the seizure of Abyei a "serious violation" of the peace agreement.

Saeed said that Khartoum remains committed to avoiding a new war. But Eddie Thomas, an analyst with the Rift Valley Institute who studies Sudan, said that some people in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum are saying that "the war has started already."

Thomas called the latest violence a "very serious departure" from the often volatile but functioning relationship between Sudan's north and south.

Over 1,400 people have been killed in South Sudan so far this year already -- more than in the whole of 2010 -- and at least 117,000 have fled their homes as violence has dramatically increased in recent months, the British charity Oxfam said.

Thousands of residents have fled south from Abyei out of fear of violence, and aid groups have relocated south of Abyei.

Residents in the southern army-held town of Agok, which lies on the southern edge of the Abyei region, are fearful of attacks. U.N. officials and aid group staff in Agok told The Associated Press by phone that intermittent artillery fire has been heard in the distance since Sunday.

The south is scheduled to become an independent nation on July 9.

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Associated Press writer Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report. Straziuso reported from Nairobi, Kenya.