Sudan accused Israel yesterday of carrying out a long-range airstrike near one of its ports that killed two people the previous night.
There were contradictory accounts from Port Sudan, on the Red Sea coast, about whether a warplane or Apache helicopters sped in from the sea and fired rockets at a car, apparently heading from the airport to the city, killing both occupants. There was initial speculation that the blast might have been caused by a missile launched at sea.
Israel declined to comment, but Israeli media suggested that the attack was a repeat of a 2009 airstrike on a Hamas weapons convoy in Sudan, which killed more than 100 people. That shipment was believed to be carrying Iranian arms across Sudan and Egypt to Gaza. Ali Ahmed Karti, the Sudanese Foreign Minister, said that he had no doubts that Israel was responsible for the attack, in which at least one Sudanese national was killed.
“We are absolutely sure of this,” he said, also accusing Israel of trying to keep Sudan on a US blacklist of states that support terror. “There have been allegations from Israel that Sudan is supporting some Islamic groups. This is not true. When Israel makes these allegations, it is trying to justify what it did yesterday,” he said.
The attack took place at around 10pm on Tuesday, about 12 miles (20km) outside Port Sudan. Officials there said that one of the dead was a Sudanese man with no links to Islamist groups or the Government, but the identity of the second man was unclear. If it was an Israeli strike, it would mean that Israeli aircraft would have flown about 800 miles and would have needed precise intelligence. Israel was blamed for the January 2009 attack in which as many as 119 people — at least half of them alleged to be weapons smugglers — were killed.
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Sudan is alleged to play an important role in weapons shipments into Gaza, and Hamas is suspected of maintaining a Sudanese base. The country remains on a US list of states alleged to sponsor terrorism, but this year Washington started efforts to remove it after the referendum in January, in which the Christian and animist south voted to secede from the Muslim north.
American officials say that weapons are flown from Iran to Sudan and transported by land across Egypt’s southern border to Sinai and on to Gaza.
According to diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks, Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, warned Sudan to stop the transhipments in January 2009 after the suspected Israeli attack. President al-Bashir, who has ruled Sudan since 1989 and is wanted for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court in The Hague, has a close relationships with many radical Islamist movements.
In the early 1990s his National Islamic Front party — since renamed the National Congress Party — welcomed Osama bin Laden to Khartoum, where the al-Qaeda chief made his home until 1996.