Sudan forces surround southerners

Rumours of forced resettlement prompted clashes last week

Sudanese security forces have arrested 250 people after surrounding an illegal shanty town full of southerners displaced by two decades of civil war.

Machine guns mounted on pick-up vehicles pointed at the ramshackle houses in Soba Aradi which is in a suburb of the capital, Khartoum.

Several lorry loads of men and women were beaten with sticks and then taken away to a local police station.

Last week, 14 policemen died during an attempt to resettle residents.

At least three other people also died in the violence, which officials say happened as crowds surrounded a police station and burnt it down.

Some 50 people were arrested in connection with the police killings and 200 held on lesser charges, the police told the BBC.

Resettle

A spokesman for the residents said no-one was being allowed out of Soba Aradi.

"They have cordoned off all areas and have taken tough measures to stop people leaving," Mohamed Ahmed Abdel Gader Arbab told Reuters news agency.

Khartoum's police chief Tarek Osman Al-Tahir said some 6,400 police officers and military were involved in the operation.

While trying to report the story, the BBC's Jonah Fisher and a news agency photographer were detained for approximately an hour by security forces and hit repeatedly around the head in the back of a vehicle, before being released.

Our reporter says some two million southerners squat illegally around the Sudan's capital.

He says the Sudanese government has a long standing policy of trying to resettle these communities, but it is often to barren, desert sites that the people don't want to go to.

But Khartoum's governor, Abdul Haleem Mutafi, denied that they were trying to resettle them and said police were hunting for known suspects in what was a criminal operation.

"This is nothing to do with the transfer of people. This is related to the security in the area. There are so many criminals in Soba Aradi," he told Reuters.

Millions of southerners have been displaced by the 21-year conflict between the Muslim north and Christians and animists in the south.

A peace deal five months ago has paved the way for the refugees to return, but there is little infrastructure and the south is one of the poorest regions in the world.