Sudan forces surround southerners

Massive trouble. I've been through this area and the camps that the government wants to move these people to along the Kosti highway. From the BBC.

Several thousand armed Sudanese security forces have surrounded an illegal shanty town full of southerners displaced by two decades of civil war.

Machine guns mounted on pick-up vehicles are pointing at the ramshackle houses in Soba Aradi which is in a suburb of the capital, Khartoum.

Several lorry loads of men and women have been arrested, beaten with sticks and taken to a local police station.

Last week, 14 policemen died during an attempt to resettle residents.

At least three other people also died in the violence, which officials say happened as crowds surrounded a police station and burnt it down.

A spokesman for the residents said no-one was being allowed out of Soba Aradi.

"They have cordoned off all areas and have taken tough measures to stop people leaving," Mohamed Ahmed Abdel Gader Arbab told Reuters news agency.

Resettle

Some 50 people were arrested in connection with the police killings and 200 held on lesser charges, the BBC's Jonah Fisher reports from Khartoum.

He says 6,400 police officers and military were involved in the operation.

Some two million southerners squat illegally around Khartoum.