Sudan said today it believed Israel was behind two attacks on suspected smuggler convoys which killed up to 40 people in the remote north of the country in January and February.
"The first thought is that it was the Americans that did it. We contacted the Americans and they categorically denied they were involved," Foreign Ministry spokesman Ali al-Sadig said. "We are still trying to verify it. Most probably it involved Israel."
His comments were the first official government acknowledgement of the strikes, first reported earlier this week in Egyptian Arabic-language newspaper el-Shorouk.
Mr Sadig said one attack was thought to have taken place in the last week of January and one in mid-February.
"We didn't know about the first attack until after the second one. They were in an area close to the border with Egypt, a remote area, desert, with no towns, no people," he told Reuters.
Sudan was gathering evidence at the sites where the convoys were hit, he added.
"There is no proof they were carrying weapons. They were smuggling something, but the pickups were small. You don't carry weapons in small pickups," he said.
The New York Timeswebsite today quoted unnamed US officials as saying Israel carried out the attack, in which at least 30 people were killed, to stop weapons being transported to Gaza during its offensive against Hamas.
Israeli warplanes attacked a convoy of trucks in Sudan in January to block a suspected arms delivery to the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas in Gaza, the New York Timessaid.
The paper said US officials who had access to classified information believed Iran was involved in the effort to smuggle weapons to Gaza. There had been intelligence reports that an operative with Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps had gone to Sudan to co-ordinate the effort.
Reports from Sudan quoted a lone survivor of the attack as saying two planes flew over the convoy then came back and shot up the "four or five" trucks.
Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert said yesterday Israel acted "wherever we can" to strike at its enemies but did not specifically mention the attack in Sudan.
"There's no point getting into details - everyone can use his imagination. The fact is, whoever needs to know, knows. Whoever needs to know, knows there is no place where the state of Israel cannot act," the outgoing premier said.
Reuters