SALON

Wednesday, Oct 24, 2012 11:08 PM UTC

Sudan blames Israel for Khartoum explosion

The Sudanese government accused Israel of carrying out an air strike on one of its arms factories

By , GlobalPost

Topics: Israel, GlobalPost, The Middle East, Sudan, Khartoum,

Sudan blames Israel for Khartoum explosionA Sudanese man shows damages in his home caused by an artillery shell in Khartoum, Sudan. (Credit: AP/Abd Raouf)
This article originally appeared on GlobalPost.

Global Post The Sudanese government on Wednesday accused Israel of carrying out an air strike on an arms factory in Khartoum, following explosions which killed two people.

Sudanese Culture and Information Minister Ahmed Bilal Osman said four Israeli planes had attacked the factory, according to the BBC.

Israel’s defense and foreign ministry declined to comment, Reuters said.

“Sudan reserves the right to strike back at Israel,” said Osman, claiming that rocket debris and other material on the site showed Israel was involved.

BBC correspondents said Israel believes that weapons are being smuggled through Sudan to Gaza, and leaked documents from the US State Department three years ago suggested that Sudan was supplying arms to Hamas.

According to witnesses, a huge fire broke out on Tuesday night at the Yarmouk arms factory in south Khartoum. Several explosions rocked the complex, which is Sudan’s main factory for ammunition and small arms, according to Reuters.

Osman, the information minister, also mentioned an attack on an arms convoy in eastern Sudan’s Red Sea province in 2009, which the government blamed on Israel.

“We are now certain that this flagrant attack was authorized by the same state of Israel. The main purpose is to frustrate our military capabilities and stop any development there and ultimately weaken our national sovereignty,” he said, according to the Associated Press.

If the attack was perpetrated by Israel, GlobalPost’s correspondent there, Noga Tarnopolsky, believes she may have seen the planes fly overhead. In an e-mail, she wrote:

“I think I actually saw the planes. I was near the Dead Sea. Four war planes in precise formation blasted above, unusually low, and I assumed they were headed to Gaza…. The planes were racing along the Syrian-African Rift Valley headed south and it was unusual enough that eveybody stretched upwards to look, and several guys down on the ground reached up as if to wave on the planes.”

An Al Jazeera correspondent reporting from Khartoum said several other eyewitnesses reported seeing a plane pass overhead before the explosions.

Agence France Presse noted that in 1998, the US-based Human Rights Watch said opposition groups alleged that Sudan was storing chemical weapons for Iraq at the Yarmouk facility.

Continue Reading Close

More Priyanka Boghani.

Next Article

Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

What To Read Awards: Top 10 Books of 2012 slide show

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 10
  • 10. "The Guardians" by Sarah Manguso: "Though Sarah Manguso’s 'The Guardians' is specifically about losing a dear friend to suicide, she pries open her intelligent heart to describe our strange, sad modern lives. I think about the small resonating moments of Manguso’s narrative every day." -- M. Rebekah Otto, The Rumpus

  • 9. "Beautiful Ruins" by Jess Walter: "'Beautiful Ruins' leads my list because it's set on the coast of Italy in 1962 and Richard Burton makes an entirely convincing cameo appearance. What more could you want?" -- Maureen Corrigan, NPR's "Fresh Air"

  • 8. "Arcadia" by Lauren Groff: "'Arcadia' captures our painful nostalgia for an idyllic past we never really had." -- Ron Charles, Washington Post

  • 7. "Gone Girl" by Gillian Flynn: "When a young wife disappears on the morning of her fifth wedding anniversary, her husband becomes the automatic suspect in this compulsively readable thriller, which is as rich with sardonic humor and social satire as it is unexpected plot twists." -- Marjorie Kehe, Christian Science Monitor

  • 6. "How Should a Person Be" by Sheila Heti: "There was a reason this book was so talked about, and it’s because Heti has tapped into something great." -- Jason Diamond, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

  • 4. TIE "NW" by Zadie Smith and "Far From the Tree" by Andrew Solomon: "Zadie Smith’s 'NW' is going to enter the canon for the sheer audacity of the book’s project." -- Roxane Gay, New York Times "'Far From the Tree' by Andrew Solomon is, to my mind, a life-changing book, one that's capable of overturning long-standing ideas of identity, family and love." -- Laura Miller, Salon

  • 3. "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk" by Ben Fountain: "'Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk' says a lot about where we are today," says Marjorie Kehe of the Christian Science Monitor. "Pretty much the whole point of that novel," adds Time's Lev Grossman.

  • 2. "Bring Up the Bodies" by Hilary Mantel: "Even more accomplished than the preceding novel in this sequence, 'Wolf Hall,' Mantel's new installment in the fictionalized life of Thomas Cromwell -- master secretary and chief fixer to Henry VIII -- is a high-wire act, a feat of novelistic derring-do." -- Laura Miller, Salon

  • 1. "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" by Katherine Boo: "Like the most remarkable literary nonfiction, it reads with the bite of a novel and opens up a corner of the world that most of us know absolutely nothing about. It stuck with me all year." -- Eric Banks, president of the National Book Critics Circle

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 10

Related Videos

More Related Stories

Comments

 9 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username ( profile | log out )

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

From Around the Web

Recommendations