Sudan's government has carried out at least 30 likely chemical weapons attacks in the Jebel Marra area of Darfur since January using what two experts concluded was a probable blister agent, Amnesty International said yesterday.
The rights group estimated that up to 250 people may have died as a result of exposure to the chemical weapons agents.
The nearly 100-page report contains gruesome photographs of children suffering from apparent chemical burns, satellite images of destroyed villages and displaced people, interviews with __more than 200 survivors, and analysis by chemical weapons experts.
Amnesty said the attacks amount to "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity".
Sudan's ambassador to the United Nations, Omar Dahab, rejected the report as "baseless and fabricated".
Sudan joined the Chemical Weapons Convention in 1999 under which members agree to never use toxic arms.
The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in the Hague, which oversees adherence to the treaty, said in a reaction it would examine the Amnesty report "and all other available relevant information."
Darfur has been engulfed in a deadly conflict since 2003 when ethnic minority groups took up arms against President Omar al-Bashir's Arab-dominated government, which launched a brutal counter-insurgency. Some 300,000 people have been killed while 4.4 million people need aid and over 2.5 million have been displaced since then.