Sudan to report Israel to UN Council over car strike

Sudan’s Foreign Ministry said on Thursday it would report Israel to the U.N. Security Council about a missile attack on its east that killed two people.

Israel has declined to comment on Khartoum’s accusation that it launched the strike near Port Sudan airport on Tuesday night. It was similar to a 2009 attack on an arms convoy in Sudan’s east which Israel neither admitted nor denied responsibility for.
“We have started the process to make an official complaint to the Security Council,” said Foreign Ministry spokesman Khaled Musa, according to Reuters.
In a written statement the ministry also denied media reports that one of the men killed was a senior official from Palestinian Hamas, saying both men in the car targeted on Tuesday night were Sudanese.
“This was a desperate Israeli attempt to damage Sudan’s image and link it to terrorism and illegal practices to derail an understanding with the United States to remove Sudan from the state sponsors of terror list,” the statement said.
Washington has begun the process of removing Sudan from its state sponsors of terror list after it recognized the result of a southern referendum on secession in January.
“Both people killed in the air strike were Sudanese, and in the area we found only two bodies. There were no foreigners with them,” police spokesman Ahmad al-Tuhami told AFP.

Victims are Sudanese

The foreign ministry confirmed that the victims were both Sudanese citizens, and gave their names as Ahmed Jibril and Issa Hadab, in a statement published by the official SUNA news agency.
Jibril was a businessman from an Egyptian-Sudanese tribe in Red Sea state who had lived in Egypt for many years before returning to Sudan in 2009, a political activist in the region told AFP.
Hadab, the car’s driver, was a fisherman and also from eastern Sudan, the activist added.
The Gaza-based Safa news agency on Thursday cited an MP from the Palestinian territory as saying the strike targeted a senior official of the Hamas movement that rules the coastal enclave.
Ismail al-Ashqar told Safa his nephew Abdel Latif al-Ashqar, whom he described as a “big military leader” within the group’s armed wing, was present at the time of the attack but survived.
He was “the main target from the air raid but Allah blinded them and saved him,” he told the news agency.
Ashqar did not respond to calls to confirm the report, and Hamas officials were not immediately available to comment on the claim.
But the Sudanese foreign ministry denied Ashqar had been in the vehicle.
Khartoum has close ties to Hamas but deny giving any support to the group.
Sudanese officials gave differing reports as to whether the missile was launched by ship or by an aircraft.
Sudan’s desert east has long been a trafficking route for arms moving through Egypt’s Sinai region into the Gaza Strip or people moving onto Europe or Israel.

Source: AlArabiya.net