- MUTAMBO GERALD IN MBALE UGNDA Royal Dutch Shell PLC warned Sunday that thieves in Nigeria's oil-rich and restive southern delta are increasingly targeting the company's crude pipelines, including at least three incidents of sabotage this month alone. In a statement, Shell's Nigerian subsidiary said damaged pipelines near Bonny in Rivers state bore signs of drilled holes and hacksaw cuts. The subsidiary said the damage suggested that thieves — known locally as "bunkerers" — had likely tapped into the lines to siphon off crude oil to sell on the black market. The subsidiary did not give an estimate of how much crude oil it had lost in the inciden…

- BY MUTAMBO GERALD IN MBALE UGANDA EL-ARISH, Egypt (AFP) – Smugglers and Egyptian police have shot dead six Eritrean migrants in incidents near the border with Israel, a security official in Egypt said on Saturday. The deadly clashes took place late on Friday after the migrants seized the weapons of the people traffickers in a bid to escape, the official told AFP on condition of anonymity. He said four Eritreans -- three men and a woman -- were killed in an exchange of fire between the migrants and smugglers, and police shot dead two Eritreans from the same group as they tried to cross illegally into Israel. According to security services in Egypt, which has a 1979 peace t…

- MUTAMBO GERALD IN MBALE UGANDA Johannesburg - A South African man imprisoned in Mauritius for a drugs-related crime has died, apparently of swineflu, the department of international relations said on Friday. Chief director of consular services Dayanand Naidoo said: "We can confirm that he has passed away and we are in contact with his family, although they have indicated otherwise (in other media reports)". Naidoo said the department could not at this stage confirm the cause of death. However, Jan Venter, 32, was thought to have died of the H1N1 virus, also known as swineflu. On being informed of the official cause of death, the department would notify Venter'…

Zimbabwe's government netted about $71m from a major sell-off of rough diamonds from its controversial Chiadzwa diamond fields, the country's mining minister has said. - Zimbabwe resumed full-scale diamond exports this by auctioning close to one million carats to international buyers at Harare airport. "We sold 893 000 carats at about $80 each (totalling about $71.44m)," Obert Mpofu told the German Press Agency. The amount sold is a fraction of the 4.5 million carats of diamonds the government says it has amassed over the past year from abundant fields in the east of the country. Before the auction, which was attended by buyers from the United States, Lebanon, In…

- MUTAMBO GERALD IN MBALE UGANDA Khartoum - Reuters- South Sudan's referendum on independence will not happen unless a deadlock within the commission planning it is broken within weeks, south Sudan's main ruling party said on Thursday. Pagan Amum, Secretary-General of the former southern rebel Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM), also said unity had not been made attractive to southerners by the northern ruling National Congress Party (NCP) since a 2005 peace deal ended Africa's longest civil war. "The referendum commission clearly seems to have reached a deadlock in the process of selection of the secretary-general. The commission is now paralysed, it…

The Mauritanian army has freed two Malian nationals it detained after raiding a branch of al-Qaeda last month with French military support, an official and a relative of the two said. - An Arab community in Mali had lodged a lawsuit against the French and Mauritanian armies last month, accusing them of kidnapping the two after a July 22 raid against a Mali base of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). "Our two citizens taken in the Timbuktu region after the French-Mauritanian raid on July 22 have been freed by the Mauritanian army," a regional government official said. "Our relatives unfairly taken away by the Mauritanian army have been freed," Mamoud Ould Maoulou…