Juba: Over 150,000 people have fled violence ravaging Sudan's contested Abyei border region and surrounding areas, a southern Sudanese minister said yesterday.

"The situation is terrible — over 150,000 have fled Abyei and the areas around," humanitarian affairs minister James Kok Ruea said.

Northern troops overran the fertile border region last week drawing condemnation from world powers who have warned the action is a threat to peace between north and south.

"Women, children, elderly — they are running in fear from brutal violence, without shelter," Ruea said, before setting off to assess the affected areas.

The figure is a huge leap from earlier UN estimates but those figures were based on the number of people who have actually been counted. Many of those fleeing are believed to be travelling off the main roads and hiding in surrounding bushes for fear of attack by northern aircraft.

"Large numbers of people continue to move on bush paths," a UN assessment report released yesterday read.

Empty

It said it was unclear how many of the estimated 110,000 residents of Abyei had fled south.

Air and ground patrols searching for people fleeing found no trace in Abyei, indicating the area is empty except for a "heavy presence of armed men," it noted.

"The air assessment mission flew over 10 villages north and south of Abyei town," the report said.

"No displaced populations were observed... burnt tukuls (thatch huts) in several villages were reported."

North Sudanese armed forces seized control of the Abyei region on Saturday by moving tanks into the main town, drawing international condemnation seven weeks before south Sudan secedes to form a new nation.

"The situation is going from worse to even worse," said Dominic Deng, commissioner of the southern Twic county in south Sudan bordering Abyei, where most refugees arrived.

Deng was speaking in Turalei in Twic county, which is about 130 km from Abyei town, the region's main settlement.

Refugee crisis

"They are sleeping under the trees. They need food and water ... some people are dying," he told reporters, while families were sitting under trees trying to escape the baking heat.

The United Nations had previously put the number of refugees at up to 40,000.

The oil-producing Abyei region was a battleground in the north-south civil war that ended in 2005. The fertile region is used all year round by the Dinka Ngok people, who have strong ethnic links to the south, and for part of the year by northern Misseriya nomads.

Land grab

Southerners voted overwhelmingly for secession in a referendum in January, a vote that was promised in the 2005 peace deal that ended the civil war.

Analysts fear a north Sudanese land grab could bring a return to full-blown conflict, a development that would have a devastating impact on the region by sending refugees back across borders and creating a failed state in the south.

Khartoum has defied calls from the United States, United Nations and south Sudan's President Salva Kiir to withdraw, saying the land belongs to the north.

A Washington-based monitoring organisation, Satellite Sentinal Project, said images and analysis indicated that the northern army and irregular forces last week loaded vehicles with items apparently taken from homes.

"The irregular payloads apparently present on the vehicles heading away from Abyei town are consistent with the photographs and reports of people from northern Sudan looting items left behind by tens of thousands of civilians who have fled the town," it said.

Kiir said on Thursday the incursion into the disputed region would not derail the south's independence.

Juba (AP) The Sudanese government's takeover of the disputed border town of Abyei increasingly appears to be premeditated, US Ambassador Susan Rice said on Thursday.

Rice said government forces seem to have used an attack by southern forces on a convoy of government soldiers from the north last week as a "pretext" to move into the town in Abyei region on the border between Sudan's north and south.

Oil politics

Both the north and south claim Abyei, a fertile region located near several oil fields. Northern tanks and soldiers rolled into the disputed region on Saturday following the attack on a northern army convoy Thursday, raising fears the dispute could trigger a return to civil war.

"There's real concern that the government of Sudan may have taken a decision to continue to occupy Abyei for its own political advantage for an indefinite period," Rice said in a conference call after returning from a Security Council trip to Africa.

"Everybody is in agreement that this is a very destabilising and unhelpful development and a violation" of the 2005 peace agreement that ended more than two decades of civil war between the north and the south, Rice said.