Sudan Rebels Down Civilian Airliner, 60 Killed

Rebels armed with shoulder-fired missiles shot down a Sudan Airways airliner, killing all 60 people aboard, the official Sudan News Agency said Sunday.

The attack came 24 hours after the rebel Sudanese People’s Liberation Army threatened to fire on all aircraft flying over their territory.

The news agency said the crash occurred Saturday, shortly after the Fokker Friendship twin-propeller plane took off from the Malakal airport for Khartoum.

Officials said they did not know if any foreigners were among the 57 passengers and three crew members. In Washington, State Department spokeswoman Anita Stockman said U.S. authorities believed no Americans were on the plane.

The plane crashed six miles from Malakal, capital of the Nile province, after it was hit by one missile.

The countryside around Malakal, 450 miles south of Khartoum, is controlled by the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army, which is armed with shoulder-fired missiles, believed to be Soviet SAM-7s.

A spokesman for the rebels’ office in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, said he could not confirm that rebel troops had downed the plane.

In Khartoum, Sudan Airways announced an indefinite suspension of flights to the south. Passengers waiting at Khartoum airport staged a noisy protest and threw rocks on the tarmac, delaying incoming flights for 45 minutes.

Airline employees called a three-day strike to protest lack of safety for planes and the delay in reporting the crash.

On Saturday, the rebels’ radio station announced that they would shoot down any plane flying over southern Sudan, including those carrying food from Western relief agencies for an estimated 2 million Sudanese facing starvation in the south. The rebels have claimed that the government uses the relief flights to ferry military supplies.

The rebels, backed by Ethiopia, have been fighting in southern Sudan since 1983 for regional autonomy, an end to Islamic law and various social, political and economic reforms. The people of southern Sudan are mainly Christian and animist. Northerners, who control the nation’s government and economy, are Muslim.