Region

JUBA –– Government forces and rebels fought fresh battles across South Sudan on Sunday, vowing to step up their offensives as regional peace brokers struggled to get ceasefire talks off the ground.

With the nation teetering on the edge of all-out civil war less than three years after gaining independence from Khartoum, Sudan’s President Omar Bashir was expected in the capital Juba Monday for talks with his counterpart Salva Kiir.

After a night of heavy gunfire in Juba, more residents could be seen trying to get transport south to Uganda, adding to the nearly 200,000 people who have already been displaced by the three-week-old conflict.

Army spokesman Philip Aguer also reported ongoing clashes in oil-producing Unity and Upper Nile states in the north, saying that government forces were advancing on the two state capitals of Bentiu and Malakal, currently in rebel hands, as well as Bor, capital of Jonglei State just north of the capital.

“The SPLA [Sudan People’s Liberation Army] forces are advancing from the northern part of Bentiu. We will try to do our constitutional duty... sooner or later our target is Bentiu,” Aguer told reporters.

“It’s a matter of time, our forces are advancing towards Bor,” he said, claiming that the rebels “realise they are fighting a useless war” and saying government forces were a mere 15 kilometres from the town.

Rebel spokesman Moses Ruai, however, insisted that it was anti-government fighters who were advancing on the capital.

“Our forces are well organised. They are not just hit and run. The next target is now Juba but I cannot tell you exactly when they will attack Juba, but they are heading there,” he said.

The conflict in South Sudan erupted on December 15, pitting army units loyal to Kiir against a loose alliance of ethnic militia forces and mutinous army commanders nominally headed by Riek Machar, a former vice president who was sacked last July.

Machar denies allegations that he started the conflict by attempting a coup, and in turn accuses the president of orchestrating a violent purge.

Fighting now grips much of South Sudan, which won independence only in 2011. UN officials say they believe thousands of people have already been killed, and both sides are alleged to have committed atrocities.

UN peacekeeping bases have also been overwhelmed with civilians seeking shelter, many of them fleeing ethnic violence pitting Kiir’s Dinka community against Machar’s Nuer tribe.

Peace talks delayed

The renewed fighting came as East African diplomats struggled to get both sides, who have sent negotiation teams to the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, to start formal negotiations on a ceasefire.

Officials said the chief negotiators for both sides held another face-to-face meeting on Sunday, and had finally agreed on an agenda for the ceasefire negotiations –– which had been expected to begin earlier in the day only to be held up by what one official described as “protocol issues”.

South Sudan Information Minister Michael Makuei said the two sides were now waiting for IGAD –– the regional bloc brokering the talks –– to present a plan for the negotiations, which according to diplomats were now expected to get under way on Monday.

Sudan’s state-owned Omdurman radio announced that Bashir, who battled the SPLA for two decades before giving in to the south’s statehood aspirations, was due to “discuss the crisis in the South” with Kiir on Monday.

US Secretary of State John Kerry urged rival southern factions not to use the Addis talks for buying time.

ISTANBUL –– Former Syrian prime minister Riad Hijab is running for the leadership of the Western-backed political opposition in a bid to make the fractious rebel movement more credible ahead of political peace talks.

The Syrian National Coalition is seeking to strengthen its position ahead of talks dubbed “Geneva II” and scheduled for January 22, as its rebel forces contend with attacks from groups linked to Al Qaeda as well as a newly formed and increasingly aggressive Islamic Front.

Hijab, who defected to Jordan with his family in August 2012, will run against incumbent Ahmad Al Jarba, whose six-month term ended last month, the media office of the Syrian National Coalition said.

“He has a real chance of winning and his experience as Syria’s prime minister will help us in the political process,” one senior coalition member said before Hijab’s candidacy was officially announced.

President Bashar Assad appointed Hijab, a former agriculture minister, as prime minister in June 2012 after a parliamentary election that authorities said was a step towards political reform but opponents dismissed as a sham.

The 47-year-old Hijab is from Deir Ezzor province in eastern Syria.

His defection prompted the White House to say the regime was crumbling from within, but almost a year and a half later government forces, backed by Shiite fighters from Iraq and Lebanon’s Hizbollah militia, have pushed back rebels around Damascus and in central Syria.

More than 100,000 people have died and millions have been displaced in the almost three-year conflict.

Hijab was not a member of the coalition until Sunday when he replaced his representative, Abdo Hussam Al Din, in the group.

Elections were also set to take place for three vice presidents and a secretary general.

PRAGUE –– Investigators have found 12 weapons inside the Palestinian mission in Prague where a New Year's day explosion fatally wounded its envoy, police said Sunday.

At the same time Prague police chief Martin Cervicek denied media speculation that an arsenal of more than 70 weapons had been kept at the embassy, but would not give details.

"I firmly protest against false information that police officers found about 70 weapons. This doesn't make sense," the website of Prague daily Dnes quoted him as saying.

Cervicek said the weapons including sub-machineguns and pistols would undergo DNA and ballistic tests, but that no further information would be made public before that has happened.

Jamal Al Jamal, the 56-year-old ambassador to the Czech Republic since October, died on January 1. Police later ruled out an assassination, instead advancing the theory that the blast was caused by an anti-theft device inside a safe Jamal was manipulating.

They also said unregistered weapons were found inside the mission in violation of diplomatic treaties.

The Czech police are pursuing their investigation into the blast with Palestinian officials sent to Prague.

Jamal will be repatriated on Monday, his daughter Rana, who lives in the Palestinian city of Ramallah, said.

She has cast doubt on the police theory of the cause of her father's death telling Dnes on Saturday, "What is certain is that it was not an accident".

Palestinian officials have given contradictory accounts of the explosion.

Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Malki has described the death as an "accident" caused by an old safe booby-trapped to explode if opened the wrong way. But a spokesman for the Palestinian embassy said the safe in question was new, often used, and contained "no built-in anti-theft system".

The ambassador's daughter said she was convinced the explosives were put inside the safe when the diplomatic mission was recently moved from a different address in the Czech capital.

"A political or other motive" could be behind her father's death, she said, without elaborating.

"I don't know and I won't mention anyone."

JEDDAH –– Human body parts fell from the sky in the Saudi city of Jeddah Sunday, with police saying they could be the remains of someone trapped in an aircraft’s undercarriage bay.

“Police received a telephone call at 2:30am from a witness reporting the fall of human remains at an intersection in Mushrefa neighbourhood” in the Red Sea city, spokesman Nawaf Bin Naser Al Bouq said in a statement.

Initial indications were that the remains “fell from a plane’s landing gear”, said Bouq, adding that investigations were ongoing.

The report came after a Saudi Arabian Airlines jet made an emergency landing in the city of Medina in the west of the kingdom, injuring 29 people on Sunday.

That aircraft had been travelling from Iran’s second city of Mashhad with 315 people on board.

A spokesman for the General Authority of Civil Aviation said there was no connection between the emergency landing in Medina and the Jeddah incident.

In a desperate attempt to cross borders, some people at poorly monitored airports climb inside the bays housing aircraft landing gear.

Most of them freeze to death once the aircraft reach cruising altitude, but some survive.

In 2010, the head of Beirut’s airport security resigned after the death of a man who managed to hide in the undercarriage bay of a Saudi-bound jet.

The man’s body was found by a maintenance worker who was inspecting the gear of the Saudi-owned Nas Air Airbus A-320 after it landed in Riyadh.

CAIRO –– Egypt said Friday a Japanese archaeological team has discovered the tomb of a leading beer producer from the pharaonic period in the country’s famed temple city of Luxor.

The tomb of Khonso Em Heb, who lived 3,200 years ago, was “one of the most important discoveries made in the city of Luxor... at the Thebes necropolis”, said Mohamed Ibrahim, Egypt’s antiquities minister.

The tomb has on its walls and ceilings landscapes and diverse sculptures that “revealed many details of daily life during the ancient Egyptian times” including family relationships and religious rituals.

One piece of artwork shows Khonso Em Heb, who also headed the royal storehouses during the pharaonic Ramesside period, making offerings to the gods along with his wife and daughter.

The archaeologists discovered the site while cleaning the courtyard of “another tomb belonging to a top official from the reign of King Amenhotep III of the 18th dynasty,” said Jiro Kondo, head of the Japanese team from Waseda University.

The tomb would be placed under tight security until the excavation work is completed, the ministry said.

Luxor, a city of around 500,000 residents on the banks of the Nile in southern Egypt, is an open-air museum of intricate temples, tombs of pharaonic rulers and landmarks such as the Winter Palace hotel where crime novelist Agatha Christie is said to have written “Death on the Nile”.

PRAGUE –– A blast that killed the Palestinian ambassador to the Czech Republic this week “was not an accident”, despite an official theory to the contrary, the envoy’s daughter said Saturday.

“What is certain is that it was not an accident,” Rana Al Jamal, who lives in the Palestinian city of Ramallah, told the Czech newspaper Dnes in an interview.

Her father, Jamal Al Jamal, the 56-year-old ambassador to Prague since October, was fatally wounded on Wednesday by an explosion in the Palestinian diplomatic mission’s premises in the Czech capital.

Czech police have excluded an assassination, instead advancing the theory that the blast was caused by an anti-theft device inside a safe Jamal was manipulating. They also said unregistered weapons were found inside the mission in violation of diplomatic treaties.

Palestinian officials have given contradictory accounts of the explosion.

Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Malki has described the death as an “accident” caused by an old safe booby-trapped to explode if opened the wrong way. But a spokesman for the Palestinian embassy said the safe in question was new, often used, and contained “no built-in anti-theft system”.

The ambassador’s daughter said she was convinced the explosives were put inside the safe when the diplomatic mission was recently moved from a different address in the Czech capital.

“A political or other motive” could be behind her father’s death, she said, without elaborating.

“I don’t know and I won’t mention anyone.”

She added: “I hope all of this will be cleared up as soon as possible and that we will know the truth.”

A security specialist, Jiri Sedivy, who was chief of staff of the Czech military from 1988 to 2002, challenged Rana Al Jamal’s evaluation.

“In contrast with the ambassador’s daughter, I don’t think it was an attack against her father. In my opinion, he died because he ineptly handled an explosive,” Sedivy said on the news website www.aktualne.cz.

He claimed a weapons cache “has practically become common in the Palestinian embassy” and hypothesised that the diplomat did not observe basic safety procedures in handling them.

The former officer said he believed an accidental explosion had inadvertently revealed a “well-organised arms and explosive distribution network... under diplomatic cover”.

The Czech police are pursuing their investigation into the blast with Palestinian officials sent to Prague.

The website of mass circulation Respekt weekly on Thursday quoted unnamed police sources as saying Jamal had probably mishandled a bomb hidden in the safe.

It also said police had found enough automatic rifles and other illegal weapons to arm a 10-man combat unit.

The ambassador’s body could be sent to the Palestinian territory next week, according to Czech media.

Jamal was a member of the ruling Palestinian Fateh Party of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas since 1975.

The Czech Republic is a staunch ally of Israel but Prague has hosted a Palestine Liberation Organisation mission since 1981, when it was the capital of Czechoslovakia.

CAIRO — Egypt’s foreign ministry said it summoned Qatar’s ambassador on Saturday to protest Doha’s criticism of the military-installed government’s crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood.

Relations between the countries deteriorated with the Egyptian military’s overthrow of president Mohamed Morsi and subsequent deadly crackdown on his Muslim Brotherhood movement, which Qatar backs.

Al Jazeera television, based in Qatar, has also incensed Egypt’s government with its coverage of a police crackdown on persistent Brotherhood protests since Morsi’s overthrow in July.

“The Qatari ambassador was summoned over a statement by the Qatari foreign ministry,” foreign ministry spokesman Badr Abdelatty told AFP.

Late Friday, the Qatari foreign ministry condemned deadly clashes between police and Muslim Brotherhood protesters across Egypt, which killed at least 17 people.

Qatar said it was “concerned by the increase in casualties from the crackdown on protests”.

It also criticised Egypt’s labelling the Brotherhood last month as a terrorist group, which tightened the screws on the beleaguered movement.

The decision was “a precursor to a shoot-to-kill policy against demonstrators”, said the statement, published by the official Qatari QNA news agency.

Doha has backed the Brotherhood in several countries swept by the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011, sparking a backlash from the Islamists’ opponents, who accused Qatar of using its natural gas wealth to prop up the organisation.

During Morsi’s single year in power, Doha pledged billions of dollars in aid to support Egypt’s battered economy, prompting accusations from Morsi’s opposition that it was trying to buy influence in the highly nationalistic country.

Doha now harbours several Islamists who fled the crackdown on the Brotherhood following Morsi’s overthrow, which killed more than 1,000 people in street clashes and imprisoned thousands more.

Egypt has called on Arab states to respect a 1998 counter-terrorism treaty and hand over Islamists wanted for trial.

One of them is Yousef Qaradawi, a prominent Egyptian-born cleric based in Doha.

Qaradawi faces trial with Morsi and 129 other suspects accused of involvement in jailbreaks and attacks on police stations during the early 2011 uprising that toppled strongman Hosni Mubarak.

He rose to prominence through his show on Al Jazeera, which Egypt accuses of biased coverage of the Brotherhood.

Egypt has jailed several journalists working for the media conglomerate since Morsi’s overthrow, including three journalists with Al Jazeera’s English language news operation.

The broadcaster’s Cairo bureau chief, Mohammed Fahmy, Australian journalist Peter Greste and producer Baher Mohamed were detained following their arrest last week in a Cairo hotel.

ADDIS ABABA — Warring parties in South Sudan delayed direct peace talks on Saturday dashing hopes of a swift ceasefire to end raging fighting and the risk of a slide into all-out civil war.

While top leaders of the government and rebel teams have briefly met directly, the rivals continued Saturday to hold separate talks with negotiators.

No timeline has been set for the crucial face-to-face talks to begin, despite the teams having already spent three days in the same luxury hotel in neighbouring Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa.

Thousands of people are feared to have been killed in the fighting since it erupted on December 15, pitting army units loyal to President Salva Kiir against a loose alliance of ethnic militia forces and mutinous army commanders nominally headed by his rival, former vice president Riek Machar.

In South Sudan Saturday the army battled to wrest back control of the oil town of Bor from rebels.

“Our forces are still moving towards Bor, there were heavy battles on Friday,” army spokesman Philip Aguer told AFP, dismissing rebel claims they had been marching on the capital Juba.

There were reports of intense battles involving tanks and artillery on the outskirts of Bor, a dusty strategic town that has already exchanged hands three times since fighting began almost three weeks ago.

The ongoing fighting prompted the top UN aid official in South Sudan, Toby Lanzer, to warn that soldiers and rebels must protect civilians and aid workers, or risk worsening a situation he described as critical.

“More people arrived at our bases in Juba... we’re up to 30,000 in the capital alone,” Lanzer said late Friday.

The US embassy in South Sudan ordered a further pullout of staff on Friday because of the “deteriorating security situation”, although Washington — a key backer of the fledgling state — insisted it remains committed to ending the violence.

Key role of regional nations

In Addis Ababa, there appeared little sign of swift progress.

South Sudan Information Minister Michael Makuei, part of the delegation to the talks, as well as rebel team spokesman Yohanis Musa Pouk, said the two sides would not meet until an agenda had been drafted by negotiators and agreed by both sides.

Makuei told AFP the two leaders of the delegations had met briefly, but that the teams were now “waiting to hear the way forward” from the negotiators, who are from the regional East African Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD) bloc of nations.

“The heads of the two delegations need to agree on an agenda... maybe tomorrow or after tomorrow,” rebel spokesman Pouk said.

IGAD, whose members include the talks host Ethiopia as well as Kenya and Uganda — all strong backers of Kiir’s government — played key roles in pushing forward the 2005 deal that ended Sudan’s two-decade-long civil war.

Uganda has deployed troops inside South Sudan to evacuate its citizens and bolster support for Kiir.

Britain’s Foreign Secretary William Hague has called Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni to discuss Kampala’s role in South Sudan, without giving further details.

Ethiopian Foreign Minister Tedros Adhanom Friday had spoken optimistically that direct talks would take place on Saturday, after the rival sides spent a day of meeting separately with special envoys from regional nations.

But Addis Ababa’s foreign ministry spokesman Dina Mufti said Saturday the two sides would continue meeting separately with negotiators.

No timeline had been set, Dina said, adding it “depends on the negotiations”.

Civilians in critical condition

Fighting started when Kiir accused Machar of attempting a coup in the oil-rich but impoverished nation.

Machar denied this, in turn accusing the president of conducting a violent purge of opponents.

Fighting has spread across the country, with the rebels seizing several areas in the oil-rich north.

Aid workers have stepped up warnings of a worsening crisis for civilians affected by the conflict in the landlocked country of almost 11 million people.

The violence has forced around 200,000 people to flee their homes and “affected many hundreds of thousands of people indirectly”, the UN’s Lanzer said. Tens of thousand are seeking refuge with badly overstretched UN peacekeepers.

BEIRUT — Five staffers of the international aid organisation Doctors Without Borders (MSF) have been taken in for questioning in northern Syria, the group said Friday.

The five staffers were taken “allegedly for questioning” from a Doctors Without Borders house in northern Syria, and have been out of contact since Thursday evening, said Michael Goldfarb, a spokesman for the aid group. He did not say whether the missing staffers had been taken by government forces or rebels fighting to overthrow President Bashar Assad, and refused to give further details out of concern for the missing workers’ safety.

Karin Ekholm, a spokeswoman for the Swedish branch of the organisation, said those seized were Swedish, Danish, Swiss, Belgian and Peruvian nationals.

The Danish branch confirmed a Dane was among those taken.

“We are doing all we can to do re-establish contact with our colleagues,” the Danish branch said in a statement.

Rami Abdel Rahman, the head of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said that members of the Al Qaeda-linked Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) had stormed a hospital in the northwestern province of Latakia and taken all of its doctors to an unknown location. Others were taken from their homes by ISIL members, he added.

Abdurrahman said it was not clear whether the Doctors Without Borders members were among those taken in Latakia.

Opposition-held areas of northern and eastern Syria have seen a wave of kidnappings over the past six months that has targeted journalists, aid workers and activists. Al Qaeda-linked rebel factions are suspected of being behind many of the abductions.

In October, several members of the International Committee of the Red Cross were briefly abducted in northwestern Syria. Many Syrian activists have fled the country after threats by ISIL and the killing of a number of citizen journalists.

Also Friday, activists reported heavy clashes between Syrian opposition fighters and ISIL members in the northern provinces of Aleppo of Idlib.

More than 130,000 people have been killed so far in the war, now in its third year, according to the observatory. The group closely monitors the violence in Syria through a network of activists across the country. The UN said in July that 100,000 Syrians have been killed, and has not updated that figure since.

Millions of Syrians have been uprooted from their homes because of the fighting.

The crisis began as an uprising against Assad’s government but later turned into a civil war. Over the past years, clashes between rival opposition groups became common in rebel-held areas.

The observatory said Friday’s fighting was concentrated in the city of Aleppo and the nearby town of Atareb. Fighting between rebel factions and ISIL, which has many foreign fighters in its ranks, has been common in areas under opposition control.

The Aleppo Media Center reported clashes between the ISIL and the Mujahedeen Army in rebel-held western parts of Aleppo.

Tension has been rising between rebel groups and ISIL of late, especially after Tuesday’s killing of a senior rebel by the Al Qaeda-linked group. The Observatory said the slain rebel, doctor Hussein Suleiman, was found dead after being shot several times and his ear was cut “with a sharp object”.

The newly created Islamic Front, an umbrella group of powerful, mostly ultra-conservative Islamic fighters, issued a statement ordering ISIL to hand over Suleiman’s killers so they can stand trial. Clashes later erupted between the groups.

A video released by activists showed dozens of people marching in Aleppo and chanting “Free Syrian Army forever, against ISIL and Assad”.

The video appeared genuine and corresponded to other AP reporting of the events depicted.