More than 600 people have been killed since rebels began an uprising in two Sudanese states last year, the interior minister said on Tuesday, but an analyst called the figure meaningless. Ibrahim Mahmoud Hamed, giving a rare casualty count, said in a report to parliament that 296 people were killed in South Kordofan last year after fighting with rebels of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N) began in June. Another 147 have died this year. "Most of them are civilians," Hamed said, but he did not specify who killed them.

In Blue Nile state, where the ethnic and religious-minority SPLM-N has been fighting since September 2011, there were 159 fatalities last year and 41 so far in 2012, the minister said. "There's no way of knowing how many people were killed," Magdi El Gizouli, a fellow at the Rift Valley Institute, told AFP. "They're not credible," he said of the numbers, partly because the government cannot determine the number of deaths in areas that are not under its control. …