South Sudanese gunmen have killed up to 49 people from a rival tribe, most of them women and children, in one of a string of attacks that have raised fears for elections in the region, officials said on Monday.
Fighters from the Lou Nuer tribe raided the village of Torkeij, home to the Nuer Jikany, in the region’s Upper Nile state on Friday, in apparent revenge for cattle thefts, a state minister said.
The remote region has long been plagued by tribal violence, often sparked by disputes over livestock, which can lead to a cycle of revenge attacks.
But ethnic fighting has intensified in recent years, fueled by a huge supply of weapons left over from Sudan’s two-decade north-south war.
The civil war, which ended in 2005, left painful scars in the south, where some ethnic groups sided with northern forces.
The UN and South Sudan’s government fear the violence may disrupt the fragile peace process and preparations for next February’s national elections, a pillar of the 2005 peace accord.
“It’s very worrisome in this context ... Elections in the context of insecurity is never a good thing,” said Lise Grande, head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in South Sudan.
“We’re very worried right now about the intensification of the attacks and the fact [that] ... women and children are being targeted.”
Upper Nile state’s information minister, Thon Mom, said 41 people were killed and 42 injured in Friday’s attack, saying it was probably linked to cattle raiding.
“The Lou Nuer attacked the Jikany,” he said.
A UN official who asked not to be named said sources on the ground had reported 49 dead and 54 injured, 24 of them severely. He said most of the dead were women and children and that emergency medical teams had been sent to the area.
More than 700 people were killed in similar fighting between the Lou Nuer and the Murle tribe in March and last month.
On Monday leaders from the Mundari and Bari ethnic groups met to try to settle differences after clashes in recent weeks close to the south’s capital, Juba.
South Sudan Peace Commission Chairman Louis Lobong was also worried about the elections.
“People may not be able to campaign freely. Mundari will not be able to go to Bari areas [and vice versa],” he said. “It is very dangerous. People may also not accept the results.”
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
BACK TO BATTLE: North Korean soldiers have returned to the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region after earlier reports that Moscow had withdrawn them following heavy losses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pored over a once-classified map of vast deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals as part of a push to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s penchant for a deal. The US president, whose administration is pressing for a rapid end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, on Monday said he wanted Ukraine to supply the US with rare earths and other minerals in return for financially supporting its war effort. “If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskiy said, emphasizing Ukraine’s need for security guarantees