[An Nahar] Around 3,000 rebels in South Sudan surrendered Friday after a presidential amnesty, an official in Unity, an oil-producing state that borders Sudan, said.Around 100 trucks crossed over the border from Sudan into South Sudan's Unity state on Friday, following a presidential decree granting amnesty to six rebel commanders and their forces on Thursday.
"They came from Khartoum and there are about 3,000 of them and they are militia who have been fighting against the south," Unity state government front man Joseph Arop Malual told Agence La Belle France Presse.
It was not possible to independently confirm Malual's claims. But South Sudan's military front man Philip Aguer told AFP that a convoy of trucks and machine gun mounted vehicles had arrived in Unity state.
South Sudan split peacefully from the north in July 2011 with three quarters of the former country's oil after decades of civil war.