KHARTOUM, 10 October 2005 — Armed men took 18 African Union personnel hostage in Sudan’s troubled Darfur region, a day after the first AU soldiers were killed in the remote area, an AU official said yesterday.
“Eighteen (AU) personnel including military observers, civilian police, a US representative and a Justice and Equality Movement (rebel) representative are held hostage today,” the acting head of the AU in Sudan, Jean Baptiste Natama, told Reuters.
He said they were being held in the Chadian-Sudanese border town of Tine in North Darfur state.
A spokesman for the AU headquarters in Addis Ababa said the kidnappers were a dissident faction from the JEM rebel group.
“We are worried by the two incidents — the killing of the two soldiers and the taking of hostages. We are worried because this is targeting the AU as a fighting force, although the AU is there as a peace force,” AU Commission spokesman Adam Thiam said.
“They were taken by a dissident group of JEM,” he said. AU Commission Chairman Alpha Oumar Konare has called for the immediate release of the hostages, he added.
On Saturday, two AU soldiers and two civilian contractors were killed in an ambush the AU blamed on the main Darfur rebel group, the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA).
The two main rebel groups, JEM and SLA, are in AU-sponsored peace talks with the government in the Nigerian capital Abuja. But negotiations have faltered in recent weeks after an upsurge of violence in the arid region.
About 6,000 AU troops are in Darfur to monitor a shaky cease-fire. Saturday’s casualties were the first in more than a year of operations there.
An AU statement yesterday said the AU soldiers involved in Saturday’s ambush clearly identified SLA uniforms and vehicles, and the attack happened in an area controlled by the rebel group.
Four soldiers were also injured in the attack in South Darfur state, and two more soldiers were missing, it said.
