UN official says South Sudan slaughter left piles of bodies

A top humanitarian official of the United Nations said on Tuesday that gunmen in South Sudan has left "piles and piles" of bodies consisting of men, women, children and elderly. Telling the Associated Press, Toby Lanzer also said that majority of the piles were left in a mosque and in a hospital. He also expressed his concern during a phone interview that the latest ethnically-targeted killings in a provincial capital would be a potential game-changer for a conflict. Fox News noted that the brewing conflict has been raging since the middle of December and has exposed longstanding hostilities between ethnic peoples.

The killings also came into mind the genocide that happened in Rwanda twenty years ago. Lanzer said kill orders were broadcasted on radio and also happened in South Sudan.

After his trip from Bentiu on Monday, Lanzer stated, "It's the first time we're aware of that a local radio station was broadcasting hate messages encouraging people to engage in atrocities. And that really accelerates South Sudan's descent into an even more difficult situation from which it needs to extract itself."

According to human rights investigators of the UN on late Monday, hundreds of innocent civilians were killed last week due to their ethnicity following the seizure of the capital of oil-producing Unity state by rebel forces. Neur, the rebel forces, are the same group that former Vice President Riek Machar had came from.

Lanzer said that the threat that more civilians will be hurt and the possibility of a public health crisis has been observed in the UN peacekeeping base in Bentiu as thousands of civilians from several ethnic groups had headed there for safety. The base reportedly holds 25,000 people but only have rations of one liter per person and one latrine per 350 people.

Also on Tuesday, British Ambassador Ian Hughes had said that the killings, which happened on April 15 and 16, were a violation of international law. He vows that the people behind the killings will be prosecuted for their crimes, Fox News reported.

Tags

South Sudan, Bentiu ethnicity killings, Nuer, Nuer killings, United Nations

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