AU interpreter killed as UN aid chief tours Darfur

KALMA CAMP, Sudan, May 8 (Reuters) Angry demonstrators killed a Sudanese interpreter working with African Union forces in Darfur today in riots which broke out during a senior UN official's visit to a camp for displaced Sudanese.

Jan Egeland, the UN under-secretary for humanitarian affairs, said the man was killed in an African Union police station after Egeland and his entourage beat a hasty retreat from the Kalma camp in the face of violent protests.

''After we left, the AU civilian police post was overrun and a member of the force was killed. He was a Sudanese interpreter,'' Egeland told reporters travelling with him.

Egeland and aid workers had cut short their visit to the camp in South Darfur State after a demonstration spun out of control and an aid worker was attacked.

Thousands of Darfuris took the opportunity of his visit to demand international troops deploy there to protect them.

A female refugee shouted that an aid worker was a member of the Janjaweed militia blamed for atrocities in Darfur.

Women wearing brightly coloured robes and men in white jalabiyyas gathered around shouting ''Janjaweed, Janjaweed'' the nattacked a U.N. vehicle with axes, stones and sticks, shattering its windows.

One man tried to stab a Sudanese aid worker for the British charity Oxfam, who was beaten as he scrambled into the car while others tried to hold off the angry crowd.

Oxfam country director Caroline Nursey said the man attacked at Kalma was a trusted long-term worker for the organisation and the crowd had misunderstood something he said.

Egeland said violence targeting the AU was repeated in other camps in West Darfur today. He urged calm saying people had to realise the 7,000-strong AU force was there to help.

GROWING TENSION Tensions have increased as refugees learned details of the peace pact signed on Friday in Nigeria between the Sudanese government and the main Darfur rebel group.

Camp dwellers' expectations had been raised for an end to three years of fighting that has driven 2 million people from their homes and into squalid camps in Darfur and into Chad.

Many were disappointed with the deal, saying it did not go far enough and they demanded international troops be deployed to protect them.

Thousands of Kalma camp residents chanting: ''Welcome, welcome international protection,'' surrounded Egeland with signs which read, ''Enough suffering for the Darfur people''.

''This peace is not reality,'' said Mohammed Jaama Sineen from Darfur's largest tribe, the Fur.

''We are asking for international forces. We want to ask Jan Egeland to send the U.N. to protect us,'' added the refugee who has lived in Kalma camp since rebels rose against the government in 2003.

The main faction of the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA), led by Minni Arcua Minnawi, signed the peace agreement in the Nigerian capital Abuja. But a rival faction, led by Abdel Wahed Mohammed al-Nur, rejected it along with a second Darfur rebel group.

Minnawi is from the smaller Zaghawa tribe but is militarily stronger than Nur, who, like many of those in the camps visited by Egeland today, is from the Fur tribe.

''This peace in Abuja is not complete. We reject it totally,'' said Ezz El-Din Ahmed, who is Fur.

''They (the government) want us to go home but we will not go back until Abdel Wahed himself comes to Kalma to tell us there is peace,'' said another Fur tribesman, Abdul Shafie Arba Hassan, who fled his home for the camp three years ago.

Western governments have called for a UN mission to take over from the 7,000 African Union peacekeepers in Darfur. Sudan has said in the past it would only consider a UN mission in its vast west after a peace agreement.

REUTERS DKS KN1950