Egypt’s military on Monday said it was carrying out an operation against illegal mining along its border with Sudan, after a rights group accused Cairo of launching an airstrike that killed dozens of Sudanese miners at a remote desert site.
Emergency Lawyers, a group that documents abuses in the war between Sudan’s army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces , said a strike on Saturday killed 72 miners at Jabal al-Uqaydat, a sprawling gold-mining area in the mountains near the disputed border. Because they were not authorised to brief the media, in a separate incident on Monday, a gunman killed two Egyptian nationals and wounded a third at a market in southern Khartoum, a Sudanese security official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
Without directly addressing the allegations, Egypt’s military said armed forces and police were carrying out a campaign against illegal gold mining near the Sudanese border to “impose full sovereignty within the borders of the Egyptian state” and protect state resources. It said “warning flyers” had been dropped before the operation targeting what it described as “criminal elements” involved in illegal mining. Sudan’s de facto leader Abdel Fattah al-Burhan on Monday ordered a probe into what he called a “painful incident in a border area between Sudan and Egypt”. He also formed a fact-finding committee comprising prosecutors, judicial officials and security representatives “to investigate the circumstances of the incident” and “submit a report on the results”, according to the Transitional Sovereignty Council, which he heads as army chief.
