At least nine people, including two children and a United Nations driver, were killed in a shootout among Sudanese soldiers in the politically sensitive southern town of Malakal, officials said on Friday.

Fighting broke out among members of the same military unit after some resisted new orders to move to north Sudan in a redeployment ahead of the expected independence of south Sudan, said government, army and UN officials.

People from the oil-producing south overwhelmingly voted to secede in a January referendum, according to preliminary figures.

The incident underlined the challenges facing Sudan as it tries to untangle joint north-south military units and other state bodies before the split, expected to take place on July 9th.

The referendum was promised in a 2005 peace deal that ended decades of north/south civil war that killed an estimated 2 million people and destabilised the whole region.

"We don't know how many bodies will be found at the site of the fighting. We know that nine people have died and 22 wounded have been admitted to the hospital," said Bartholomew Pakwan Abwol, spokesman for the government of the surrounding Upper Nile state.

He said the dead included two soldiers and two children.

JOINT PATROLS

A Sudanese driver working for the UN's refugee agency UNHCR was caught in the crossfire and died in hospital on Friday afternoon, said UN spokesman Kouider Zerrouk.

Malakal, the main town in Upper Nile and the site of past north-south clashes, has been patrolled by a joint north-south unit made up of troops from the northern Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) and the southern Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA).

"There was a disagreement between (members of) the SAF component in Malakal. They were asked to move north," said a UN official on condition of anonymity.

Abwol said the protesting SAF soldiers were ethnically southerners.

"Some are refusing to go north and be disarmed. They are southerners and they have rights here. But they think they will have no rights in the north," he said.

The southern army moved in to try to create a buffer zone between the fighting troops, said SPLA spokesman Philip Aguer.

Aguer said the southern SAF soldiers were loyal to Gabriel Tang, a former southern warlord who joined the northern army then patched up his differences with the southern leadership ahead of the referendum.

"It was they who objected to the order to move their equipment north. They did not want to see their tanks and artillery going north or to Khartoum," said Aguer.

Source: Reuters