South Sudan leader slips boarding plane, aircraft glitch delays return - spokesman

KHARTOUM Tue Nov 4, 2014 7:53pm GMT

A technical fault with the aircraft delayed his departure, however.

Kiir, who has led South Sudan since it seceded from Sudan in 2011, had been in Khartoum for talks with Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir on security and other issues. South Sudan has been grappling with civil conflict for almost 11 months.

"He was getting up on the plane stairs and he slipped on one of the stairs," presidential spokesman Ateny Wek Ateny told Reuters by phone, adding that security guards supported him.

"After slipping, he boarded the plane and the plane failed to take off due to mechanical problems," Ateny said.

He will return to Juba on Wednesday.

Sudan's ambassador to Juba, Matref Sadiq, also told reporters at Khartoum airport that Kiir would spend the night in the Sudanese capital and return to South Sudan on Wednesday, adding he was "in very excellent health".

A conflict erupted in South Sudan in mid-December last year, sparked by a political rift between Kiir and a former deputy he had sacked a few months earlier, Riek Machar, who has been leading rebel forces against the government.

Fighting has killed at least 10,000 people and driven hundreds of thousands from their homes.

Until South Sudan's independence, Kiir had been a Sudanese vice president to Bashir.

(Reporting by Khalid Abdelaziz in Khartoum and Drazen Jorgic in Nairobi; Writing by Maggie Fick and Edmund Blair^[1])

References

1. ^{^} Edmund Blair (blogs.reuters.com)