Sudanese armed forces have launched new offensive more than nine kilometres inside South Sudan's border, an official has revealed.
The incursion on Sunday comes just days after the south announced it was pulling its troops from a disputed border town to avoid an all-out war between the two countries.
Deputy Director of Military Intelligence for South Sudan Major General Mac Paul said that ground troops from Sudan launched three waves of attacks on Sunday.
Paul said the Sudanese forces "have come deeply in the south'' and attacked with artillery and tanks. He said the attack was part of a "continuous provocation from the Sudanese Army."
A soldier's body and two wounded soldiers were brought to a hospital, the clinical director at the Rubkona Military hospital, Dr. Zecharia Deng Aleer, said.
Aleer added that the soldiers were brought in from around the Pariang Junction, in South Sudan's Unity State.
Paul said it was the first major engagement between the two armies since South Sudan announced it would pull out from the contested border town of Heglig.
Closer to full scale war
Sudan and South Sudan have been drawing closer to a full-scale war in recent months over the unresolved issues of sharing oil revenues and the disputed border.
The international community, led by the US, has called for the two countries to stop all military actions against each other and restart negotiations to solve their disputes.
President Barack Obama on Friday asked the presidents of Sudan and South Sudan to resume negotiations and said that conflict is not inevitable.
Talks between the two countries over the unresolved disputes that were being mediated by the African Union, broke down in Ethiopia earlier this month.
The African Union on Sunday called on Sudan and South Sudan to end "senseless fighting."
"The commission urges the two parties to immediately and unconditionally resume negotiations ... to reach agreements on all outstanding issues,'' AU Commission Chairman Jean Ping said in a statement.|
Last week, South Sudanese troops seized Heglig, which the southerners call Panthou, sending Sudanese troops fleeing. The Khartoum government later claimed to have regained control of the town.
A US monitoring group said on Sunday satellite imagery appear to shows the fighting around Heglig had caused major damage to oil pipeline infrastructure.
The Satellite Sentinel Project said the images show severe damage and in such a critical part of the oil infrastructure, that it would likely stop oil flow in the area.
Sudan's official news agency, SUNA, said late on Sunday the Sudanese Ministry of Petroleum and the oil companies operating in Heglig oil field began repairing the oil installations which had been damaged by South Sudan's army
during their invasion of Heglig region.
South Sudan broke away from Sudan July last year after an independence vote, the culmination of a 2005 peace treaty that ended decades of war that killed more than 2 million people. Despite the treaty, violence between the two countries has been on the rise.
Separately, a UN mission in Sudan said one of its policemen died on Sunday from injuries sustained in an attack in West Darfur. The police unit had come under attack by assailants Friday, a UN statement said.
UNAMID has a large peacekeeping force in Sudan's Darfur region made up of UN and African Union forces.
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