The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court plans to indict suspects for atrocities in Darfur by February, nearly two years after the UN Security Council asked him to probe the Sudan region.
In a report ahead of his address tomorrow to the council, prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo said his office was preparing submissions for arrest warrants to judges of the ICC's pretrial chamber.
"We are planning to complete this work no later than February," Mr Moreno-Ocampo, an Argentine, said in the report.
ICC chief prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo
Arrest warrants are equivalent to indictments at the ICC, the world's first permanent criminal court based in The Hague, Netherlands.
Mr Moreno-Ocampo said that since the start of the investigation, his team has carried out more than 70 missions to 17 different countries and conducted more than 100 interviews, many of which were with victims of crimes in Darfur.
But he said that due to the violence in Darfur, he interviewed witnesses outside of Sudan, an arduous task.
Evidence, the report said, included rape, torture, wilful murder, sexual violence and torture in Darfur, where at least 200,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million have been displaced in fighting among rebels and government forces since 2003.
The ICC can only prosecute suspects when national courts have failed to do so.
Mr Moreno-Ocampo said Sudan so far had not conducted trials for the most serious crimes "and those who bear the greatest responsibility for those crimes."
But he said he was travelling to Sudan again in January to get information on the arrest of 14 people accused of crimes in Darfur and hoped Khartoum would let him talk to the suspects.
Louise Arbour, the UN high commissioner for human rights, organised an investigation in Darfur two years ago and came up with a list of suspects, including Sudanese officials, military and rebel leaders.
Since Mr Moreno-Ocampo organised his staff in 2003, he has indicted four leaders of Uganda's brutal Lord's Resistance Army and one Congolese, the only one arrested.