UN to withdraw staff from Darfur

The United Nations has announced it is to withdraw non-essential staff from the war-torn Sudanese region of Darfur.

The move comes after a prosecutor at the International Criminal Court sought the arrest of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir for genocide in Darfur.

Judges have still to decide whether there are reasonable grounds for an arrest warrant to be issued.

The Reuters news agency has quoted Mr Bashir as saying that the accusations against him are lies.

Earlier, Sudan's foreign ministry said it did not recognise the ICC, and any of its decisions were "non-existent".

In the US, the White House said President George W Bush was "gravely concerned" by increased insecurity in Darfur and the impact it is having civilians and aid workers.

His spokeswoman said that the government of Sudan needed to live up to its commitment to provide increased security to humanitarian envoys.

As of May this year, the joint UN-African Union Darfur mission, Unamid, included nearly 9,600 uniformed personnel and about 1,300 civilian staff, both international and local.

It is not clear how many will be withdrawn. But Gen Martin Luther Agwai, Unamid force commander, said the peacekeepers would maintain their unit strength and would not stop patrolling.

"We will continue to protect the UN personnel and UN facilities that are here and we will continue to help the humanitarian organisations to continue to do their job of rendering humanitarian services to the people in Darfur," Gen Agwai said.

A Sudanese official told the BBC that he had been informed by Unamid the evacuation would begin on Tuesday.

"This is a unilateral decision which the Sudanese government was not involved in," Mr Mutrif Seddeek told the BBC.

While clarifying that the ICC is an independent body over which it has no influence, the UN is nevertheless bracing itself for possible increased difficulties in western Sudan, the BBC's David Bamford reports.

But it is continuing to run, alongside other NGOs, large-scale humanitarian operations there and has thousands of peacekeepers in place, our correspondent notes.