Muslims burn and destroy the central church located in Khartoum’s Al-Jerif neighbourhood. The Sudan Presbyterian Evangelical Church, which has a congregation partly comprised of Southerners, is part of a larger compound that houses a number of other services, including a school. The structure was left in a shambles after Muslim mobs by the hundreds stormed the premises on Saturday, April 21. Whole rooms were ransacked, materials looted and part of the grounds set ablaze. This is Islam.
This ABC report equivocates between the north and south when it is the Islamic north, the aggressor, that has been persecuting, enslaving and slaughtering the South for decades, mirroring all of the jihad wars across the world. The moral equivocation of mainstream media.
Muslim Mob Burns Catholic Church in Sudan Capital ABC News
A Muslim mob set ablaze a Catholic church frequented by Southern Sudanese in the capital Khartoum, witnesses and media reports said on Sunday.
The church in Khartoum's Al-Jiraif district was built on a disputed plot of land, but the Saturday night incident appeared to be part of the fallout from ongoing hostilities between Sudan and South Sudan over control of an oil town on their ill-defined border.
Sudan and South Sudan have been drawing closer to a full-scale war in recent months over the unresolved issues of sharing oil revenues and the disputed border.
Last week, South Sudanese troops seized Heglig, which the southerners call Panthou, sending Sudanese troops fleeing. The Khartoum government later claimed to have regained control of the town.
The witnesses and several newspapers said a mob of several hundred shouting insults at southerners torched the church. Fire engines could not put out the fire, they said.
One newspaper, Al-Sahafah, said the church was part of a complex that included a school and dormitories. Ethiopian refugees living in the Sudanese capital also used the church.
The mostly Christian and animist South Sudan seceded from Sudan in 2011, some six years after a peace deal ended more than two decades of war between the two sides. Tens of thousands of southerners remain in Sudan, a legacy of the civil war that drove hundreds of thousands to seek relative safety in the north of what was then a single Sudanese nation.
Vice President Ali Osman Taha rejected suggestions by South Sudan for the deployment of international forces in Heglig, saying in a television interview that the area was internationally recognized as Sudanese territory.
