Gunmen Attack South Sudan Vice President’s Convoy

CHANNELS TV

Gunmen attacked the vice president’s convoy in South Sudan on Tuesday and wounded three of his bodyguards, a government official said, underscoring worsening insecurity in the oil-rich nation.

First Vice President Taban Deng Gai, who joined the government after defecting from the main rebel group last year, was not in the convoy because he was traveling by plane at the time, State Minister of Information Jacob Akech Deng said.

The vehicles were assaulted as they headed north from the capital Juba to the town of Bor, he said.

“Three people were wounded. These are security guards of the first vice president,” Deng said. “No soldier died and the convoy of the first vice president has reached Bor safely.”

South Sudan, the world’s youngest nation, erupted into civil war in 2013 after President Salva Kiir, an ethnic Dinka, fired his deputy Riek Machar, a Nuer.

The fighting that followed split the country along ethnic lines, spurred hyper-inflation and plunged parts of the nation into famine, creating Africa’s biggest refugee crisis since the Rwandan genocide in 1994.