Juba, 30 April 2018 – A team working for the international medical organisation Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors without Borders (MSF) were victims of a violent armed robbery on Tuesday 24 April. The robbery took place in an area south of Mundri town in South Sudan. MSF condemns this brutal act.
While the MSF team was delivering much-needed healthcare to remote areas of Mundri, a group of 10 unidentified armed men stopped their convoy, physically assaulted the team, threatened them with violence and took their personal belongings, along with medical supplies and other MSF property.
This attack forces MSF to stop operating mobile clinics in the area until safe access to the isolated communities we support can be assured by all armed actors. The people of South Sudan suffer most when our mobile clinics and other facilities cannot operate safely. In this case, the armed robbery directly affects much needed healthcare services for around 75,000 people.
MSF has been operating in Mundri since October 2016. Despite the challenges we face when providing much-needed medical and humanitarian assistance, from January to March 2018, MSF provided 1,760 medical consultations to communities in Mundri, including 509 patients treated for malaria.
Notes to the editors:
We are not quite sure who attacked the MSF convoy, which is why we refer to them as “a group of unidentified armed men”.
While we stopped running mobile clinics in the area around Mundri, we will still have a MSF presence in Mundri.
We do not want to specify the nationalities of the MSF colleagues affected by this incident. There were national and international staff on board the convoy.
