Aid groups in Sudan on Tuesday said that at least 54 people were killed in a military airstrike on a local market in the country’s western region.
The strike on Monday on the village of Tora caused a huge fire, said Adam Rejal, a spokesman for the General Coordination, a local group helping displaced people in Darfur.
Brigadier General Nabil Abdullah, a spokesman for the Sudanese military, said that civilians had not been targeted, adding the allegations were “incorrect” and “are raised whenever our forces exercise their constitutional and legal right to deal with hostile targets.”
Photo: AFP
The strike tore apart a large part of the weekly market in Tora, which is 80km north of el-Fasher, the capital city of North Darfur Province.
Support Darfur Victims, a local group that provides support to people caught up in the Darfur conflict, shared graphic video footage appearing to show burned structures and charred bodies on the ground.
More than half of the dead were women, according to a list of casualties provided by Rejal.
At least 23 people were wounded and seven were missing, the list showed.
Rejal said that the strike was “a crime against humanity and a clear violation of all international and humanitarian laws and conventions.”
The city of el-Fasher is held by the Sudanese military despite near-daily strikes by rival paramilitary group the Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
Monday’s airstrike was the latest deadly attack in a war that started in April 2023, when simmering tensions between the military and the RSF exploded into open warfare across the country.
The war wrecked the capital and other urban cities across the country.
It has killed more than 28,000 people, forced millions to flee their homes and left some families eating grass in a desperate attempt to survive as famine sweeps parts of the country.
Other estimates suggest a far higher death toll.
The fighting has been marked by atrocities, including mass rape and ethnically motivated killings that amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity, especially in the western region of Darfur, according to the UN and international rights groups.
The military has made steady field advances in the past few months against the RSF in Khartoum and elsewhere in the country.
This month it regained control of most of the strategic and government buildings in the capital, including the Republican Palace — the seat of the pre-war government.
A French-Algerian man went on trial in France on Monday for burning to death his wife in 2021, a case that shocked the public and sparked heavy criticism of police for failing to take adequate measures to protect her. Mounir Boutaa, now 48, stalked his Algerian-born wife Chahinez Daoud following their separation, and even bought a van he parked outside her house near Bordeaux in southwestern France, which he used to watch her without being detected. On May 4, 2021, he attacked her in the street, shot her in both legs, poured gasoline on her and set her on fire. A neighbor hearing
DEATH CONSTANTLY LOOMING: Decades of detention took a major toll on Iwao Hakamada’s mental health, his lawyers describing him as ‘living in a world of fantasy’ A Japanese man wrongly convicted of murder who was the world’s longest-serving death row inmate has been awarded US$1.44 million in compensation, an official said yesterday. The payout represents ￥12,500 (US$83) for each day of the more than four decades that Iwao Hakamada spent in detention, most of it on death row when each day could have been his last. It is a record for compensation of this kind, Japanese media said. The former boxer, now 89, was exonerated last year of a 1966 quadruple murder after a tireless campaign by his sister and others. The case sparked scrutiny of the justice system in
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
‘HUMAN NEGLIGENCE’: The fire is believed to have been caused by someone who was visiting an ancestral grave and accidentally started the blaze, the acting president said Deadly wildfires in South Korea worsened overnight, officials said yesterday, as dry, windy weather hampered efforts to contain one of the nation’s worst-ever fire outbreaks. More than a dozen different blazes broke out over the weekend, with Acting South Korean Interior and Safety Minister Ko Ki-dong reporting thousands of hectares burned and four people killed. “The wildfires have so far affected about 14,694 hectares, with damage continuing to grow,” Ko said. The extent of damage would make the fires collectively the third-largest in South Korea’s history. The largest was an April 2000 blaze that scorched 23,913 hectares across the east coast. More than 3,000
RSS