JUBA, Sudan: More than 160 people were killed when heavily armed South Sudan tribal fighters launched a dawn raid on a rival group, officials said on Monday, the latest in a series of bloody ethnic clashes.
Most of the victims were women and children when men from the Murle ethnic group attacked a camp in the Akobo area of the region’s swampy Jonglei state, where oil exploration is under way, on Sunday morning, officials said.
“Hundred women and children, 50 men and 11 SPLA (soldiers from the southern Sudan People’s Liberation Army) are being buried by the riverside this morning,” Akobo commissioner Goi Jooyul Yol said in a statement. “There may still be bodies in the bush, we don’t yet know the full number,” Yol later told Reuters by telephone.
Yol said a small force of southern soldiers that had been stationed in the area to protect the settlement was overrun by the attacking Murle. Officials said most of the victims were from the Lou Nuer group, locked in a tribal war with the Murle that has already claimed over 700 lives this year in attacks and counter-attacks.
