The deputy defense minister, Col. Ibrahim Shamsul-Din, and the others had been touring a southern military area and were headed back to Khartoum when their plane crashed, state television said. Besides the deputy defense minister, those killed were a general, seven lieutenant generals, three brigadiers, a lieutenant colonel, a colonel and a corporal. The crash took place in Adaril, in an oil-rich area 470 miles south of Khartoum that has been the scene of attacks on aircraft by southern rebels. The military remains the main power broker in Sudan, not least because the country has been embroiled in civil war for 18 years. All the dead were buried in Adaril hours after the crash, Osman said.
Muslim tradition holds that burial take place following the first noon prayers after death.
The blow to Sudan's military hierarchy came amid sharpening tensions between the government and opposition leader Hassan Turabi, a rightist Islamic ideologue. Turabi was arrested earlier this year after his party announced it was forging an alliance with southern rebels. The crash also came at a time when Sudan was believed to be using its newfound oil wealth to take the upper hand against the rebels. Sudan in 1998 began exporting oil from the Bentiu fields near Adaril, and there have been a series of rebel attacks on the area. The conflict between Sudan's Islamic government in the north and rebels fighting for increased autonomy in the predominantly Christian and animist south has killed nearly 2 million people.