South
Sudan has deported three U.S. citizens, two of whom served in the military and
a third who deserted, U.S. and South Sudanese officials said on Wednesday.
Social
media accounts and a magazine interview in the names of two of the men
suggested they had recently been fighting pro-Russian forces in Ukraine.
Craig
Lang, William Wright-Martinovich and Alex Zwiefelhofer were detained on June 21
trying to cross to South Sudan from Kenya, said Lt.-Col. Joe Buccino from
America’s 82nd Airborne Unit.
Buccino
said that they were deported to Kenya.
He said
that Private First Class Zwiefelhofer was absent from the 82nd without leave.
“We are
working with U.S. authorities in the area to return Private First Class Alex
Zwiefelhofer to U.S. military control. They are in Kenya,” he said in an email.
It was
not clear when the three were transferred to Kenyan custody. Kenyan authorities
did not return calls seeking comment.
South
Sudanese foreign affairs ministry spokesman Mawien Makol said the three had
been deported because they did not have visas but said they may have claimed to
be journalists.
“I heard
about three American journalists who were detained on the border between Kenya
and South Sudan because these journalists had not received visas,” he told
Reuters.
South
Sudan’s four-year-old civil war has displaced more than three million people
and briefly sparked a famine earlier this year.
A
Facebook page and Instagram account in Zwiefelhofer’s name show him in military
uniform and photographs of flags, weapons and buildings that appear to have
been taken in Ukraine, where foreign volunteers are helping to fight
pro-Russian separatists.
Foreign
citizens have showed up in South Sudan’s conflicts before, when it was fighting
neighboring Sudan before independence in 2011.
The life
of former drug addict turned pastor Sam Childers featured in the 2011 movie
“Machine Gun Preacher”, although officials later cast doubt on some of his
story.
In 1991, British aid worker Emma McCune married rebel
fighter Riek Machar, who is leading the rebellion in the current civil war.
McCune and her unborn child died in a car crash in Nairobi,
Kenya two years later.
(Source: Reuters/NAN)
