A SUDANESE official has claimed that hundreds of people were killed earlier this year when foreign warplanes bombed three convoys smuggling African migrants through Sudan along with weapons that were apparently destined for the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.
Others suggest the death toll was below 50.
Sudan yesterday blamed Israel for the attacks.
Outgoing Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert has hinted at his air force’s possible involvement in the attacks. They came after Israel ended a 22-day assault on Gaza without fully achieving one of its aims: to choke off Hamas weapons supplies.
Israeli officials have warned that the militant Islamic group is seeking more powerful weapons than the crude Qassam rockets and Grad missiles it fires at Israeli communities.
An Israeli role in the Sudan bombings, if confirmed, would signal Israel’s determination to strike far beyond its borders to protect its security. It would also be seen as a warning to the most powerful Hamas patron, Iran, which Israel and others fear is developing a nuclear weapon.
The bombings brought a new layer of tragedy to Sudan, a country already in the grip of an armed insurgency. The victims were migrants from Sudan, Ethiopia and other African countries who were seeking a better life in Israel and Europe, and young men and boys working as porters and drivers for the smugglers.
Al Fatih Mahmoud Awad, a spokesman for Sudan’s transport ministry, said on Thursday that as many as 800 people died in the attacks in January and early February. He said more than a dozen vehicles made up each convoy.
The Associated Press quoted a Sudanese foreign ministry official, Ali Youssef, as saying there were conflicting accounts of the number of casualties.
Sudan’s transport minister, Mubarak Mabrook Saleem, discussed the attacks at a news conference in Khartoum earlier this week. The news was not reported in the country’s newspapers, suggesting the government might be embarrassed to acknowledge that a foreign country could violate its sovereignty and air space so easily.
Mr Saleem told the Associated Press that he believed the aircraft were American, but other officials said they were not identifiable.
The US military on Thursday denied having made any recent airstrikes on Sudan.
CBS News reported on Wednesday that Israel carried out the January bombing.
The network said Israel had learned of plans to move weapons through Sudan north to Egypt, then across the Sinai and through tunnels into Gaza.
Thirty-nine people riding in the 17-truck convoy were killed, CBS said. Mr Awad, the transport ministry spokesman, put the death toll at 14.
Reuters said two warplanes hit the convoy in a desert region northwest of Port Sudan on the Red Sea coast.
Mr Awad said 17 people were killed three weeks later in the second bombing raid. The third attack caused many of the smuggled weapons to explode and was by far the deadliest, he said. The weapons were “modern and expensive-looking”, he added, and “were headed for Gaza, probably”.
Israel’s military refused to confirm or deny a role in any of the bombings.
But Mr Olmert, speaking at an academic conference, said: “We operate everywhere we can hit terror infrastructure – in close places and in places farther away. Wherever we can hit terror infrastructure, we hit them, and we hit them in a way that increases deterrence.”
Mr Olmert is due to step down as prime minister next week and made the remark during a speech summing up his accomplishments.
He said Israel had acted beyond its borders in “a series of incidents”, a reference widely understood to include the bombing of an alleged Syrian nuclear facility in 2007 and the assassination of a senior Hizbullah warlord in the Syrian capital last year.
Military experts said Israeli warplanes had the range to fly the 2,700km (1,680-mile) round trip to Sudan and back.
Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, a former Israeli army chief of staff, said Israel would have needed intelligence from western allies to pinpoint the location of smuggling convoys.
Before ending the Gaza assault on January 18th, Israel secured pledges from the US and other western nations to co-operate in blocking the smuggling of arms into Gaza.
Israeli officials say some Gaza-bound weapons move by sea from Iran to Yemen, and others are bought in Sudan’s flourishing arms market.
Both routes converge over land into Egypt and are used for smuggling migrants as well as weapons.
Reva Bhalla, a Washington-based analyst at private intelligence company Stratfor, said Iran pays for the weapons and often sends agents of Hizbullah, the Lebanese militia, to buy them in Sudan and to hire the smugglers.
Mr Awad blamed government neglect of eastern Sudan for driving young people into the smuggling trade.
Those killed in the bombings “were boys, many 12 or 13 years old, looking to earn some money. Smuggling is the quickest way.”
After the bombings, family and tribesmen of the victims began searching for their loved ones, he said. "We missed our people and started investigating. We eventually found the wreckage." – ( LA Times-Washington Postservice)