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Mystery strike on car kills two in Port Sudan
By REUTERS
04/06/2011


Police say car probably hit by missile fired from the sea; state media says aircraft was foreign.

KHARTOUM - Two people were killed in an attack on a car near Port Sudan on Tuesday, which police suggested was a missile fired from the sea, while state media and a regional government official blamed a foreign aircraft.

Witnesses at the scene near the airport at Sudan's main port city said the small car was destroyed and the two charred bodies of its passengers could be seen.

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"A missile from an unknown source probably bombed the car," police spokesman Ahmed Al-Tahmi told Reuters. He earlier told local radio the missile had likely been fired from the Red Sea.

The Sudanese Media Center, a news agency linked to Sudan's state security apparatus, and the speaker of the Red Sea state parliament, Ahmed Tahir, said an unidentified aircraft had flown into Sudanese air space to bomb the car.

The plane came in from the Red Sea and flew back after the bombing, Tahir said. The Sudanese Media Center said the army responded with missiles that the foreign plane managed to evade.

"We heard three loud explosions," a source at Port Sudan airport told Reuters. "We went outside to see what was happening and eye witnesses told us they saw two helicopters which looked liked Apaches flying past."

Tahir said the two people killed were traveling into the town from the airport when their car was hit. They have not been identified.


Sudan's foreign ministry declined to comment. Sudan's army was not immediately available to comment.

This is not the first time mystery has surrounded a strike in Sudan's eastern Red Sea state.

In January 2009, unknown aircraft hit a convoy of suspected arms smugglers on a remote road in the state according to Sudanese officials, a strike that some reports said may have been carried out by Israel to stop weapons bound for Gaza.

A total of 119 people were killed in that strike near Sudan's border with Egypt, according to state media, even though the attack was disclosed only two months after it occurred.

Sudan is on a US list of state sponsors of terrorism, but Washington this year initiated the process to remove it from that list after a peaceful January referendum in which the country's south voted to secede.