Sudan vows swift response to south's oilfield grab

Sudan's government promised on Thursday to deal "within hours" with South Sudan's occupation of a vital border oilfield and the southern government said it would not leave the area until the threat of attacks by the northern army had gone.
   
The stand-off follows clashes along the ill-defined border that have brought the neighbours closer to full-blown conflict than any time since the South declared independence last year.
   
Khartoum was demanding an immediate and unconditional retreat from Heglig, Sudan Foreign Ministry spokesman El-Obeid Morawah told satellite news channel Al Arabiya, calling the incursion "a blatant assault on Sudan's sovereignty".
   
Ahmed Haroun, governor of Sudan's South Kordofan province,  said crude production had stopped in Heglig, which South Sudan claims as its own, but the army was "dealing with the situation".
  
 "We hope we can finish that operation in hours," he told reporters in the town of Talodi in South Kordofan.
   
With the European Union voicing "deep concern" at the escalating conflict, the north said it was mobilising its army to retake the Heglig field, which accounts for about half of Sudan's 115,000 barrel-a-day output.
   
The South said it took control of the Heglig area on Tuesday to put an end to attacks from the north.
   
"There must be a mechanism so they don't launch another attack," South Sudan's Information Minister Barnaba Marial Benjamin cited President Salva Kiir as saying.
   
He told Reuters in the southern capital Juba that Sudan's air force had dropped six bombs near the oil town of Bentiu in Unity State on the southern side of the border on Thursday, killing one soldier.
   
Sudan's armed forces spokesman was not immediately available to comment despite multiple attempts to call his mobile phone.
   
Sudan halted talks with Juba over oil payments and other disputed issues after South Sudan occupied the oilfield.
  
Officials in the north accuse South Sudan of "using mercenary forces and rebel groups" in its attack and decried what they said was a plot, sponsored by Juba's foreign allies, to overthrow the government in Khartoum.
   
Reuters