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Hundreds of Sudanese refugees crossing into Chad each week, UN says

Hundreds of Sudanese refugees crossing into Chad each week, UN says

Refugees transport water to camp in Touloum
A team from the United Nations refugee agency has arrived in a Chadian border town to verify reports that 200 to 300 Sudanese refugees have been crossing weekly from the Darfur region into Chad since the beginning of April, an agency spokesman said today.

The UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) spokesman, Ron Redmond, said in Geneva that new refugees in the town of Bahai, joining the 7,000 already registered there, told the team that they fled after Sudanese militia members attacked them on 2 April, looting and burning their homes.

UNHCR and its partner, CARE, will distribute aid to refugees in the Kariari area, 35 kilometres north of Bahai, temporary home to 16,000 refugees who fled Sudan at the end of January and the beginning for February after aerial bombs hit their villages, and the militias then attacked them, he said.

The water available for the two refugee camps was becoming scarce, he added.

The Chadian hosts and those refugees they had taken in have resorted to eating seeds called mukhet, usually used as cattle feed. Not only were they at risk of malnutrition, but the International Rescue Committee told UNHCR that the refugees attending their mobile clinic in Kariari were suffering from diarrhoea, respiratory infections and conjunctivitis.

Meanwhile, the UN fact-finding team dispatched from Geneva to look into Darfur's human rights situation was in al-Fasher, the capital of Northern Darfur State, in western Sudan. The team was due back in Geneva next week, when they would submit their report to Acting High Commissioner for Human Rights Bertrand Ramcharan.

World Food Programme (WFP) Executive Director James Morris, leader of a UN humanitarian assessment mission for Darfur, arrived today in Sudan's capital Khartoum, with his team.