Briefly

SUDAN

Kerry arrives on 3-day visit

KHARTOUM | Sen. John Kerry arrived in Sudan on Wednesday for a three-day visit as the diplomatic detente between Washington and Khartoum shows further signs of a thaw.

Mr. Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, will lead a congressional delegation to Sudan’s Darfur region and hold talks with senior members of the Sudanese government.

Mr. Kerry is not expected to meet with President Omar Bashir, Sudan’s leader who last month was indicted by the International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes.

Gen. Bashir on Monday welcomed “positive signs” sent by President Obama to the Islamic world. Washington has had tense relations with the Bashir government. The United States imposed economic sanctions on Sudan in 1997 and labeled it a “state sponsor of terrorism.”

Ties were strained further by the conflict in Darfur, which both Mr. Obama and his predecessor, George W. Bush, have called genocide, a description Sudan’s government rejects.

SUDAN

Darfur rebels sentenced to death

KHARTOUM | A Sudanese court Wednesday sentenced to death 10 members of the Darfur rebel Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) for an unprecedented 2008 attack on the Sudanese capital.

The men were found guilty of involvement in the attack on the Khartoum suburb of Omdurman in May. Three others were acquitted and will be freed, the court said.

More than 200 people were killed and hundreds injured when JEM launched the shock attack. The rebels drove across hundreds of miles of desert and scrubland to reach the capital and were only repelled at a bridge a few miles away from the presidential palace.

TOGO

President’s brother held in coup plot

LOME | Togolese security forces arrested the president’s brother Wednesday on suspicion of plotting to seize power while the head of state was overseas, the West African nation’s government said.

President Faure Gnassingbe canceled a trip to China on Sunday after foreign security services warned him a strike was imminent. Togo’s public prosecutor later said a planned attack on national security had been foiled.

“Kpatcha Gnassingbe was arrested on Wednesday morning in Lome on leaving the United States Embassy where he had sought refuge,” the government’s official Web site said.

Kpatcha Gnassingbe, who is a member of parliament and a former defense minister, was one of the chief conspirators in a plot to seize power while the president was in China, it said.

Faure Gnassingbe was elected leader of Togo in a violent and flawed vote in 2005, taking over from his father who had ruled the country with an iron first since seizing power in 1967.

BURUNDI

Deal reached on force integration

BUJUMBURA | Burundi and the rebel National Liberation Forces (FNL) have agreed to integrate about 3,500 rebel fighters into the national army and police, a presidential military adviser said Wednesday.

Gen. Evariste Ndayishimiye told Agence France-Presse that the remaining rebel fighters will be demobilized. The rebels say that they have a 21,000-strong force but the government and international community put the number much lower.

The deal was reached during recent negotiations in South Africa.

A diplomatic source said the two sides hoped to complete the integration by the end of April. The source said South Africa is anxious to withdraw its forces currently deployed in Burundi as part of an African Union peacekeeping mission.

Bujumbura and the FNL rebels agreed on Dec. 4 to resolve the final obstacles delaying the implementation of a peace deal reached in September 2006.

From wire dispatches and staff reports