Seven Sudanese dead, sixteen others wounded in Dafur unrest

Seven Sudanese people were killed and 16 others were wounded last week when armed men attacked a village in South Darfur, a group representing hundreds of thousands of people displaced by the Darfur conflict said on Tuesday.

General Coordinating Committee for Refugee and Internally Displaced Camps, a non-government group, accused members of mainly Arab militias known as Janjaweed of attacking the Habouba village on Thursday.

No official word on who is responsible for the attack that targeted one of the villages that voluntary started to receive returning citizens who fled their homes during the conflict which broke out in Darfur in 2003.

Local officials in the South Darfur state said that about 200 armed men attacked the village, adding that a joint security force repelled the deadly attack, the state news agency SUNA reported.

They gave different estimates of the number of victims. Conflict broke out in Darfur after mostly non-Arab rebels rose up against Khartoum. Up to 300,000 people have been killed and 2.7 million displaced, according to U.N. estimates.

Government forces and the Janjaweed militias were accused of committing atrocities during the conflict, accusations that authorities at the time denied.

Suzan O/AllAfrica