Sudan's president accuses aid groups of helping rebels

KHARTOUM, Sudan (Reuters) -- Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir accused aid organizations of helping southern rebels and has threatened to end their operations, newspapers reported Sunday.

"The Sudanese government is to reconsider the operations of the Lifeline program and all the international organizations working in the field of relief in the south and to close Sudan's airspace to relief planes specializing in providing support for the rebel movement," he was quoted as saying.

Operation Lifeline Sudan is a United Nations-led relief effort which supplies aid to civilians in both government and rebel-held areas in war-ravaged south Sudan. It operates out of Kenya and Khartoum.

Bashir, addressing a meeting in Khartoum on Saturday to discuss recent attacks by the main rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), said some organizations have misused the permission to operate in the country to support the rebels.

"We will not allow the rebel movement to be supplied through Operation Lifeline," Bashir said, adding that Sudan also would consider stopping aid flights from neighboring countries.

"We cannot permit the lifeline to become the deathline, to deliver death to all the Sudanese people," he said.

The U.N. said in March it would tighten flight procedures after it ferried pro-government militia leaders on a relief plane, triggering a weeklong hostage crisis in February.

More than 1.5 million people have died in conflict and war-related famine and disease in Sudan's 17-year-old civil war, which has broadly pitted the Muslim and Arab north against the mainly animist and Christian south.

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