Darfur, December 05: Unknown armed men kill two Rwandan peacekeepers and seriously injure three others in the Darfur region of western Sudan, a peacekeeping official says.
A convoy of three pick-ups and a tanker truck transporting Rwandan soldiers was at a water post near a market, two kilometers from the United Nations African Union Mission (UNAMID) base in Saraf Omra in Darfur Friday afternoon, when they came under attack, said UNAMID’s head of communications, Kemal Saiki.
“The peacekeepers responded but showed restraint so as not to cause victims among the civilian population” at the scene, Saiki told AFP, adding that the assailants fled on foot.
“We have no indication of the number of assailants. We suspect that this was an attempt to steal the vehicles, but we cannot be sure of that,” he said.
Since the launch of the mission in January 2008, 19 UNAMID personnel have been killed in the war-torn Darfur region.
The UN says up to 300,000 people have died from the combined effects of war, famine and disease and more than 2.7 million have fled their homes since conflict erupted in Darfur in 2003 between separatist rebels and the central government in Khartoum.
——Agencies