KHARTOUM: The political supremo of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, Khaled Meshaal, said his group produces and smuggles weapons, during a visit to Sudan on Wednesday.

Your brothers in Palestine, despite the blockade and the closing of border passages … despite the fleets from east and west, despite all of this, we buy arms, we manage to produce arms and we smuggle arms, he said in a recording of a speech to young members of President Omar Al-Beshir s ruling party.

The Damascus-based leader of Hamas, who arrived in Khartoum on Tuesday, did not elaborate on the type of arms produced or the suppliers of weapons.

An air raid by foreign aircraft on a convoy of trucks in eastern Sudan in January killed 119 people, the country s news agency Suna reported in May, giving an official death toll for the first time.

The convoy had been transporting illegal immigrants to Egypt, General Abdul-Rahim Mohamed Hussein told a parliamentary committee investigating the attack, Suna said.

But Time Magazine has reported that the convoy was carrying rockets and Iranian explosives bound for the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip during an Israeli offensive against Palestinian militants.

Citing two senior Israeli security officials, the magazine said Israeli fighter-bombers had carried out the attack.

Hamas, whose militants fire homemade Qassam rockets at southern Israel, at the time denied the report. -AFP