Abducted traders returned home

The Sudanese government has said a group of 113 people seized by the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA)in 1997, had been repatriated. Muhammad Dirdeiry, Deputy Head of Mission in the Sudanese Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, told IRIN that the group was taken when the SPLA overran Yei, Western Equatoria, southern Sudan. “They were mostly northern traders residing in Yei and its environs,” he said. According to the government, the group was first taken by the SPLA to neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)in 1997, where their release was eventually secured with the help of international humanitarian agencies. After their release, members of the group made their way through Uganda into Kenya. The Sudanese Embassy in Nairobi assisted with their repatriation to Sudan, Dirdeiry said.
Meanwhile, more than 60 Ugandans who escaped from the Sudan-based Ugandan rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) are to be repatriated. A UNICEF official said the 62 people had been held in captivity by the LRA in different parts of southern Sudan over several months. Twenty-six of them are children. They were taken to Khartoum, where they received medical treatment, and will be flown from the Sudanese capital to Entebbe, Uganda. This is the fourth group of former rebel captives to be repatriated from Sudan since December 1999, when Kampala and Khartoum signed an agreement to normalise relations, the BBC said.