 | | | New abduction comes a day after a Red cross employee was kidnapped in Darfur (File) |
TRIPOLI / KHARTOUM (Agencies) Two Sudanese staffers of Libya's Gaddafi Foundation who had been reported kidnapped in Darfur are free, Sudan's state minister for humanitarian affairs told AFP on Friday, saying they had never been abducted.
"I have just contacted the security people at El-Fasher (capital of north Darfur). The two Sudanese from the Gaddafi Foundation were freed after half an hour. It was a misunderstanding," Abdel Baqi Gilani said, adding that they had never been kidnapped but declining to elaborate.
" I have just contacted the security people at El-Fasher (capital of north Darfur). The two Sudanese from the Gaddafi Foundation were freed after half an hour. It was a misunderstanding " Abdel Baqi Gilani Sudanese intelligence services also insisted that the two men had not been abducted, according to a senior official with the U.N.-African Union peacekeeping force.
The source told AFP that the intelligence services informed the joint force that the two men had been briefly detained by a group of armed men in the suburbs of El-Fasher on Wednesday, questioned and then released.
There were no further details on why they had been seized.
Gaddafi Foundation officials earlier reported that the men, whose names were not given, had been kidnapped. They maintained their insistence on this, even after Gilani's announcement.
The pair were project leaders for the Association of the Brothers of the South, an arm of the foundation run by Gaddafi's son Seif al-Islam, association director Mashaallah Zaoui said.
They were snatched as they supervised projects in Darfur, Zaoui said, without giving other details.
On Thursday the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) announced that one of its employees, Gauthier Lefevre, a Frenchman who also holds British nationality, had been abducted in Darfur.
Gilani told AFP Lefevre is in "good health" and that he expected him to be released soon, but voiced fear of more abductions and urged foreign relief organizations to bolster security.
A relief official echoed his concern and said: "What has been happening in Darfur is very worrisome. I hope that the government will take this seriously."
Lefevre's abduction is the fifth of a foreign relief worker in the volatile Darfur region since March.
On Sunday, two female aid workers, Irishwoman Sharon Commins and Ugandan Hilda Kawuki, were freed after 107 days as hostages in Darfur.
Their was the longest period of captivity endured by foreign aid staff in Darfur since the conflict erupted in the region in early 2003.
Two members of Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres, MSF) and French aid agency Aide Medicale Internationale (AMI) were kidnapped in March and April but later freed unharmed.
However, two civilian employees of the U.N.-African Union joint peacekeeping force in Darfur who were snatched in August at Zalingei in west Darfur are still in being held by their abductors.
The United Nations says up to 300,000 people have died and 2.7 million have fled their homes since ethnic minority rebels in Darfur rose up against the Arab-dominated government in Khartoum in February 2003.
The government says 10,000 people have been killed.
Sudan's President Omar al-Beshir is the target of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur.
Rights campaign group Amnesty International has called on Nigeria to arrest Beshir if he accepts an invitation from the African Union to a meeting in Abuja next week on the Darfur crisis. |  | Foreign judges " It will require a strengthening of the existing system with new mechanisms, including a special criminal chamber which shall be a hybrid court drawing on the expertise of qualified and appropriate judges from outside Sudan " African Union report on Darfur Meanwhile, the African Union urged Sudan in a report released Friday to set up a court which includes foreign judges to try the gravest crimes committed in Darfur
The 148-page report's findings on justice for the victims in Darfur recommended that Sudan's judicial system, which faces a crisis of confidence, needs to be strengthened to cope with such cases.
The document, compiled by a panel headed by former South African President Thabo Mbeki, said Khartoum should accept non-Sudanese help to investigate and try atrocities in Darfur.
"It will ... require a strengthening of the existing system with new mechanisms, including a special criminal chamber which shall be a hybrid court drawing on the expertise of qualified and appropriate judges from outside Sudan," it said.
It said judges need not only be African. However, the court should operate within the Sudanese judicial system and work alongside traditional justice mechanisms.
Sudanese law should be amended to fully incorporate international law, and the country's security forces should no longer enjoy immunity from prosecution.
The report's findings had been keenly awaited as the African Union had supported Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir after the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague issued a warrant for his arrest for war crimes in Darfur this year.
The report did not take a position on the ICC's arrest warrant for Bashir but said the ICC investigation should be included on the agenda of Darfur peace talks. |
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