POLICE in Sudan arrested a national head of the aid agency Médecins sans Frontières over a report issued about the widespread rape of women by soldiers and militiamen in Darfur.

Paul Foreman, a Briton who heads the Dutch branch of the organisation, was taken for questioning by security forces in Khartoum yesterday.

Mohamed Farid, the Sudanese Attorney-General, said that he had opened a criminal case against Médecins sans Frontières Holland for publishing the report in March, which detailed hundreds of rapes over a recent 4½-month period. Mr Farid said that MSF had failed to consult the Government-run Humanitarian Aid Commission before publishing the information and, despite repeated requests, had refused to supply medical evidence to back up its claims.

“If they don’t give us the medical documents, we will send them to the criminal court accused of publishing a false report which harms the general peace,” Mr Farid told Reuters.

Mr Foreman was released on bail. Under Sudanese law, he could be jailed for up to three years. Geoff Prescott, the head of MSF Holland, said that he was outraged by the arrest.

In its report, The Crushing Burden of Rape: Sexual Violence in Darfur, MSF said that its doctors had treated nearly 500 rape victims aged between 12 and 45 between October last year and February.

These numbers reflected only a tiny fraction of the total number of sexual assaults in that period because many of the women were too scared to report the crime, the authors said. More than 80 per of the victims, who included pregnant women, said that they had been raped by militiamen or soldiers, while half said that they had also been physically abused.

MSF did not say whether the perpetrators included only Government troops and the state-supported Janjawid militia, who are accused of causing the humanitarian crisis, or whether rebel militia were also involved.

When the report was published, Mr Foreman acknowledged he was acting in defiance of orders from the Sudanese Government, but said that he would not violate patient-doctor confidentiality by handing over medical records.

“They have expressed their strong desire that we don’t publish it, and I politely declined,” Mr Foreman said.

Jan Egeland, the UnderSecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs at the UN, supported publication of the report, which he said provided some of the first documented medical evidence of rape in Darfur. But the Sudanese Government has long denied that systematic rape has occurred in its western province, where more than 180,000 people have died since February 2003 and 2 million people have fled their homes.

“These kind of false reports damage the image of Sudan,” Mr Farid said yesterday. Aid organisations working in Darfur are forced to operate under tight restrictions, and face a dilemma over whether to speak out against the government, or to remain quiet so that they are left to continue their work. Last year Oxfam and Save the Children were threatened with expulsion for issuing reports that embarrassed the authorities.

Journalists are also finding it increasingly difficult to gain access to Darfur, with visa applications taking six months or more to be processed.

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