Skip to main content

Mystery armed men arrive in CAR

A plane carrying around 50 armed men has landed illegally in northern Central African Republic, the foreign minister has told the BBC.

Jean Paul Ngoupande said the plane had arrived from Sudan and was suspected of being linked to the rebellion in Chad.

Earlier this month, UN chief Kofi Annan said he was concerned that the fighting in Chad could further destabilise both Sudan's war-torn Darfur region and CAR.

Mr Ngoupande said he was lodging a complaint with the African Union.

Analysts say CAR is being used by Sudanese rebels as a crossing point to Chad.

Tension is rising in Chad ahead of elections due next week.

Rebel accusations

President Idriss Deby insists that the polls will go ahead despite a rebel attack on the capital N'Djamena earlier this month.

Sudan and Chad accuse each other of backing rebel groups.

Mr Ngoupande said his government was going to talk to the Sudanese authorities about the plane.

Earlier reports said that two planes had landed in CAR.

President Francois Bozize seized power in CAR three years ago, and since he stood successfully in a presidential election last year, a rebel movement has emerged in the north.

Thousands have fled the fighting, crossing into Chad.

But the BBC's Joseph Benamsse in the CAP capital, Bangui, says that military sources say CAR's rebel groups are no longer operating in the area where the plane landed.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

US says world safer, despite 11,000 attacks in '05

The U.S. war on terrorism has made the world safer, the State Department's counterterrorism chief said on Friday, despite more than 11,000 terrorist attacks worldwide last year that killed 14,600 people. The U.S. State Department said the numbers, listed in its annual Country Reports on Terrorism released on Friday, were based on a broader definition of terrorism and could not be compared to the 3,129 international attacks listed the previous year. But the new 2005 figures, which showed attacks in Iraq jumped and accounted for about a third of the world's total, may fuel criticism of the Bush administration's assertion that it is winning the fight against terrorism. Asked if the world was safer than the previous year, U.S. State Department Counterterrorism Coordinator Henry Crumpton told a news conference, "I think so. But I think that (if) you look at the ups and downs of this battle, it's going to take us a long time to win this. You can't measure this month ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Al-Qaeda number two in new video

Al-Qaeda's number two Ayman al-Zawahiri has appeared in a video saying that Iraqi insurgents have "broken the back" of the US military. He praised "martyrdom operations" carried out by al-Qaeda in Iraq in the video, posted on an Islamist website. And he called on the people and army of Pakistan to fight against President Musharraf's administration. This is the third message from prominent al-Qaeda leaders to emerge within a week. A tape from Osama Bin Laden was broadcast on 23 April, followed two days later by a message from Iraqi insurgent Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Pakistan focus Zawahiri, who wore a black turban and a white robe in the video, described the leaders of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Iraq as traitors, and urged Muslims to "confront them". He praised Iraqi militants, saying that the US, Britain and allies had "achieved nothing but losses, disasters and misfortunes" in Iraq. "Al-Qaeda in Iraq alone has carried out 800 ma...
Post a Comment
Read more

Does light have mass?

The short answer is "no", but it is a qualified "no" because there are odd ways of interpreting the question which could justify the answer "yes". Light is composed of photons so we could ask if the photon has mass. The answer is then definitely "no": The photon is a massless particle. According to theory it has energy and momentum but no mass and this is confirmed by experiment to within strict limits. Even before it was known that light is composed of photons it was known that light carries momentum and will exert a pressure on a surface. This is not evidence that it has mass since momentum can exist without mass. [ For details see the Physics FAQ article What is the mass of the photon? ]. Sometimes people like to say that the photon does have mass because a photon has energy E = hf where h is Planck's constant and f is the frequency of the photon. Energy, they say, is equivalent to mass according to Einstein's famous formula E = m...
6 comments
Read more