A mob set ablaze a church in capital city Khartoum, media reports said Sunday.
News reports said the mob’s target was a Catholic church frequented by Southern Sudanese. The church in Al-Jiraif district was allegedly built on a disputed plot of land. However, this could not be independently verified.
The Saturday night incident was said to be part of the fallout from ongoing hostilities between Sudan and South Sudan over control of an oil town on their ill-defined border.
Both countries have been drawing closer to a full-scale war in recent months over several issues ranging from disputed border to sharing oil revenues.
Last week, South Sudanese troops seized Heglig, which the southerners call Panthou, sending Sudanese troops fleeing. The Khartoum government later claimed to have regained control of the town, AP reported.
The witnesses and several newspapers said a mob of several hundred shouting insults at southerners torched the church. Fire engines could not put out the fire, they said.
According to Al-Sahafah newspaper, said the church was part of a complex that included a school and dormitories. Ethiopian refugees living in the Sudanese capital also used the church.
The mostly Christian and animist South Sudan seceded from Sudan in 2011, some six years after a peace deal ended more than two decades of war between the two sides. Tens of thousands of southerners remain in Sudan, a legacy of the civil war that drove hundreds of thousands to seek relative safety in the north of what was then a single Sudanese nation.
Vice President Ali Osman Taha rejected suggestions by South Sudan for the deployment of international forces in Heglig, saying in a television interview that the area was internationally recognized as Sudanese territory. With Agency inputs
