Prosecutors on the International Criminal Court will seek an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar al-Beshir next week for genocide and crimes against humanity in Darfur, reports said Friday.
ICC chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo will request the warrant on Monday in the first-ever bid before The Hague-based tribunal to charge a sitting head of state with war crimes, said the Washington Post, citing diplomats and UN officials.
The bid to indict Beshir was also reported by The Guardian newspaper in Britain and France's Le Monde.
The Post said some UN officials feared the move could complicate the peace process in Darfur and trigger a military response by Sudanese forces or their proxies against UN and African Union peacekeepers.
Sudan's UN ambassador Abdalmahmood Abdalhaleem Mohamad warned the newspaper of "grave repercussions" if Beshir was indicted.
"Ocampo is playing with fire," the ambassador said. "If the United Nations is serious about its engagement with Sudan, it should tell this man to suspend what he is doing with this so-called indictment.
Moreno-Ocampo's office announced Thursday that he would unveil a new case on abuses in Sudan's Darfur region and name suspects next Monday. It said the case would cover "crimes committed in the whole of Darfur over the last five years".
A spokeswoman Friday refused to confirm the reports that Beshir would be among those pursued.
"The prosecutor will make his announcement before a judge of the court on Monday, and we will not give details to the press until after," she said.
The tribunal will then decide whether to issue arrest warrants or summons.
On Tuesday, seven UN peacekeepers were killed and 22 were wounded in the ambush of a UN convoy in Darfur.
UN officials in Sudan said the Janjaweed -- state-backed Arab militia -- were suspected of carrying out the attack, while Sudan's government blamed the attack on rebels in Darfur.
According to the Washington Post, representatives of the UN Security Council's five permanent members -- China, Britain, the United States, France and Russia -- met UN officials Thursday on the safety of Darfur peacekeepers in the wake of the attack.
It said peacekeepers are being moved to safer areas, and that the UN is distributing food and equipment in preparation for a possible cut off of supplies to the force by Sudan's government.
"All bets are off; anything could happen," one UN official told the newspaper. "The mission is so fragile, it would not take much for the whole thing to come crashing down."
The UN force, UNAMID, is under-staff and ill-equipped, with only a third of its projected total of 19,500 soldiers and 6,500 police currently deployed.
Beshir's regime has refused to allow the deployment of Nepalese, Scandinavian and Thai soldiers and remains reluctant about any non-African troops reinforcing the mission.
In talks with UN Security Council ambassadors in Khartoum last month, after Moreno-Ocampo accused the Sudan state apparatus of war crimes in Darfur, Beshir slammed what he called a vicious campaign against his country.
Sudan rejects the ICC's jurisdiction and refuses to surrender two war crimes suspects already named.
NGO Human Rights Watch said the possibility of Beshir's arrest was "very exciting".
If the rumours were true, "for us this is what the institution was created for ... the fight against impunity" at the highest level, spokeswoman Geraldine Mattioli told journalists in The Hague.
"We hope the Security Council will take measures" if Sudan did not co-operate, she added.
Beshir could become only the third sitting president to be tried by an international court.
The late Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic and Liberia's Charles Taylor were both charged while in office by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the Special Court for Sierra Leone respectively.
PHOTO CAPTION:
Omar al-Beshir
AFP