KHARTOUM, April 11 (AFP) -
Several Christians were injured and some 100 were arrested Wednesday in clashes in Khartoum between security forces and worshippers protesting a government order to move an Easter service to a suburb, witnesses said.
Among the people arrested were pastors, said the witnesses, who could not say exactly how many protesters were injured.
Thousands of young Christians, almost all of them from southern Sudan, had gathered in front of the All-Saints Church in downtown Khartoum and began to throw stones at passing cars to protest the government's cancellation of a service due to take place Tuesday.
Clashes had also broken out Tuesday after the government order was announced, with police injuring some protesters and detaining about 40 people, church officials said.
A visiting German evangelist, Reinhard Bonnke, took a flight back home Tuesday night after the Sudan Council of Churches advised him to leave.
"We refused to move the celebration in view of the short notice and of the unsuitability of the proposed venue," said Enock Tombe Stethen, the church council's secretary general.
At a press conference Wednesday in the All-Saints Church, Episcopal Church secretary general Ezekiel Kondo called for an investigation into the Tuesday clashes "to redress the injustice Christians to which Christians are subjected."
Church council vice president Taban Alu Nyal called for a meeting between Christian leaders and President Omar al-Beshir, but said efforts for him to see the country's leader has so far failed.
Nyal said former Sudanese president Abel Alier had briefly been arrested in the clash Tuesday but released after questioning.
The church official added that security services were still holding about 100 Christians and that he would be requestioned himself Thursday.
Interior Minister Abdel Rahim Mohammed was quoted saying Wednesday that the prayer service was prohibited from an open space in Khartoum to "avert friction between different believers."
But Mohammed, quoted by the independent Al-Ayam daily, said his government respects the right of all people, including Christians, to practice their religion.
He noted that when Pope John Paul II visited Sudan in 1993, he gave a mass in the same square (Green Square) where the prayer service was banned on Tuesday.
Religious tension is rife in Sudan, where the mostly Christian and animist south has been fighting successive Islamic and Arab governments in Khartoum for the past 18 years.