KHARTOUM: Sudan said yesterday that foreign warplanes carried out a deadly strike on an arms convoy headed for Gaza in January as Israel refused to comment on reports that it was responsible.
US television network CBS said 39 people were killed in the strike which came hot on the heels of Israel’s devastating three-week offensive against the Hamas rulers of Gaza at the turn of the year.
“A convoy of vehicles carrying illegal weapons was bombed near the Sudanese-Egyptian border in mid-January,” state Transport Minister Mabruk Mubarak Saleem told AFP, adding that several people had been killed. Saleem later told Al-Jazeera satellite television that the weapons were headed for Gaza.
The minister, who is a former commander of the Eastern Front rebel group that signed an October 2006 peace deal with Khartoum ending decades of civil war, said that arms smuggling remained rampant in the region because of the marginalization of his Rashidiya Arab tribe. “Rashidiya tribesmen engage in this illegal trade because they’re so poor,” Saleem said.
The US television network CBS said that it was Israeli aircraft that carried out the attack on the 17 trucks killing 39 people. It cited Pentagon sources as denying earlier reports that the warplanes were American. The Israeli army refused to confirm or deny any involvement. “We are not in the habit of reacting to this sort of report,” an army spokesman said.
In a speech later in the day in the coastal town of Herzliya, outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said, “We operate in many places near and far, and carry out strikes in a manner that strengthens our deterrence.”
In Israel the airstrike dominated news coverage on both public and army radios and all the main papers.
The liberal daily Haaretz cited Israeli security sources as saying that an international network had been set up in which smugglers moved arm caches from Iran through the Gulf to Yemen, across the Red Sea to Sudan and then on through Egypt to Gaza. “If the reports are true, the bombing in Sudan was an important message of deterrence from Israel to Iran,” the paper said in an analysis.
In recent weeks, the Israeli premier has alluded to a series of “major operations” carried out during his term of office that he has declined to detail.
In another still unexplained incident, warplanes bombed five fishing boats off Sudan’s Red Sea coast on Jan. 16, wounding 25 people, Sudanese security sources told AFP.
