LRA reported to have burnt southern villages

A Sudanese pro-government militia has accused the Ugandan rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) of burning down villages in southern Sudan after losing the support of the Khartoum government, news agencies reported on Thursday. The head of the government-aligned Equatoria Defence Force (EDF), Theophilus Ochang, was quoted by the ‘New Vision’ as saying that several people were killed when LRA fighters torched a number of villages after Sudanese President Umar Hasan al-Bashir said last month that he would no longer provide them with military or logistical support. Theophilus said his own family had come under attack. “They killed my father-in-law and threw him into his own burning hut,” he said. The EDF said it had launched a counter-attack against the LRA, and that fighting was continuing. The ‘New Vision’ quoted a Sudanese government official as saying the rebels were attacking because they were in desperate need of food and clothes, and that a number of Ugandans had deserted the rebel militia in recent weeks.