SAF: ‘SPLA forces in Lake Alubaid defeated’.

The Sudanese Armed forces said they managed on Saturday night to defeat the rebels of the SPLA in South Kordofan’s region of Lake Alubaid, where the armed forces seized the head of division nine in all its three camps. Colonel Elsawarmi Khalid Saad, the spokesman for the armed forces, said that the armed forces are now continuing to comb the area and hunt down the rebels. The Sudan People’s Liberation Movement however strongly denied this happening, and asserted in return that it had destroyed a whole unit of militias affiliated to the National Congress Party and its armed forces near the city Toroj, killing 60 of the Sudanese army and militia and destroying 3 armored vehicles. They also stated that they took over armored vehicles and artillery guns with a number of ammunition and fuel. The media adviser to the head of the SPLM in South Kordofan, Gamar Dalman, told Radio Dabanga that the region of Jao which the Sudanese army claimed to have entered, is a region that lies within the territory of South Sudan and is not inhabited by a single soldier of SPLA forces in North Sudan. In Muglad, security forces arrested a number of people from the Messeriya tribe in South Kordofan on Friday. The most prominent detainees were Musa Bakht Musa who is a graduate from Babanusa college, Fadul Mohammed Tom who was a Sudan People’s Liberation Movement candidate for the state legislature for the year 2011 and from Dibab constituency and Hamedin Issa Nour. The detainees, according to sources in Muglad, are young and concerned of issues regarding the Messeriya, and were among those who resisted the attempts of the National Congress Party to pull the Messeriya in the war going on in the state as part of the militias of the NCP and the People’s Defense Forces. Activists say that the detainees were deported to Kadugli and tortured from the moment of their arrests. They also added that the state was dominated by discontent by arrests.