Car explosion in Port Sudan linked to Israel

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
A powerful car explosion, which rocked Sudan’s main port on Tuesday, killing one person, has been linked to Israel by Sudanese government officials. The car was blown up by what appears to have been a missile attack, in Port Sudan, a city of over half a million people on the Red Sea. A local reporter told Reuters news agency that the blast site featured “two small but deep holes” and “another hole beneath” what was left of the gutted car. Many observers consider Port Sudan, an ancient city that has traditionally connected Sudan with Egypt in the north and Saudi Arabia across the Red Sea, as a major link in the complex smuggling network that supplies goods and weapons to the Gaza Strip. Israel has long asserted that the smuggled items are secretly carried from Port Sudan into Egypt, before eventually ending up in the Palestinian enclave that is controlled by militant group Hamas. The government of Sudan vehemently denies these charges. But a “local security source” in Port Sudan told Reuters that the car’s driver, Nasser Awadallah Ahmed Said, who was killed in the blast, was an eminent member of the Red Sea’s Ababda Bedouin tribe, whose members have a long history of smuggling weapons and goods to and from Sudan. Speaking on Tuesday, Sudan’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ali Ahmed Karti, stopped just short of directly fingering Israel as the culprit of the attack. Karti, who is Sudan’s most senior government official to have so far commented on the blast, told local news media that “the style of the car explosion was similar to Israel’s attack on [Sudan’s] Red Sea State [province] last year”. He was referring to a similar incident that took place in April of last year in the very same province where Port Sudan is located. At that time, Khartoum directly blamed Israel for the strike. IntelNews reported in 2009 that, according to Sudanese officials, Israeli warplanes hit locations around Port Said three times that year, targeting convoys travelling through Sudan’s desert on the Red Sea coast. One such official, Fatih Mahmoud Awad, from Sudan’s Ministry of Transport, claimed that the three airstrikes had destroyed dozens of vehicles and killed “as many as 800 people”. Reuters contacted the Israeli government about Tuesday’s strike in Port Said, but Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said he was “not going to respond to generic allegations”.