Injured residents still hiding in bush after attacks

JUBA (AP):

South Sudan residents with gunshot and stab wounds continue to emerge from the bush weeks after a massive tribe-on-tribe attack killed an untold number of people, an international medical group said yesterday.

"One recurring characteristic of the attacks in Jonglei is their extreme violence," Doctors Without Borders said yesterday, describing the account of one woman who said she ran away from attackers for 11 hours.

She and her 15 family members were then found by a group of men who beat her daughter and shot at them, she told the medical group, wounding her in the thigh and her son in the chest. The boy survived.

A 24-year-old woman who was shot in the leg and cheek told Doctors Without Borders that her village was the first to be attacked. When Lou Nuer warriors arrived, she and two other women fled with their children.

"We ran and tried to hide in the high grass when we heard them approaching. But they heard my child crying so they found us three women and the three children. They abducted my child and slit the throats of the two boys in front of us. They told us three women to run. We ran 10 metres (yards) and they started shooting. The other two women were killed right away," the woman said.

Doctors Without Borders said its workers have seen dozens of gunshot and stab wounds at one hospital and that 25 of their local staff of 156 remain missing. The group said one of their clinics in the village of Lekwongole was largely destroyed.