抖阴ap

JUBA, Sudan — Southern Sudan soldiers attacking a rival ethnic group fired indiscriminately on unarmed men, women and children at a remote Nile River village, killing or wounding hundreds of civilians, according to witness accounts in a confidential U.N. report.

A U.N. team that traveled to the village 11 days after the April 23 killings saw more than two dozen corpses and said grass-roofed mud huts clearly contained many more bodies, but the toll of 254 dead civilians from a local official has not been independently verified.

The three U.N. reports obtained by The Associated Press are the first accounts of mass civilian casualties in the village of Kaldak caused by soldiers from Southern Sudan.

The Texas-sized south voted in January to secede from Sudan and becomes independent in July. It has been strongly supported by the U.S. and other Western nations.

While the Khartoum-based Sudanese government has been vilified for carrying out genocide in Darfur and for invading Abyei — a central region contested by the north and south — last month, the reports obtained by AP raise serious questions about human-rights abuses carried out by southern forces, known as the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, and about how much control their leaders have over them.

One survivor said the southern soldiers “shot at anything . . . moving or standing” amid the riverside scrub brush.

The U.S. has provided between $150 million and $300 million worth of “transformation initiatives” to the southern military, the Switzerland-based Small Arms Survey reported last year.

It was not immediately clear if any of the southern soldiers involved in the April 23 killings in Jonglei state had been trained or equipped by the U.S. The unit is commanded by Lt. Col. John Mama Korog, one of the U.N. field reports said. The No. 2 commander was identified as Maj. John Goang Galluak.

The southern military’s spokesman, Col. Philip Aguer, told AP on Thursday that 165 people died in the battle, including 30 civilians. Mixed among fighters the SPLA battled were women and children, some of them armed, Aguer said. If civilians were killed, it was in the crossfire, he said.