Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir danced before thousands of supporters in Darfur yesterday, defying a possible arrest warrant for genocide on a heavily protected visit to the war-torn area.

Travelling by plane and in a convoy of army, police and national security vehicles mounted with guns and backed by air support, Bashir was greeted by thousands of supporters in state capitals El Fasher and Nyala.

Civil servants, tribesmen, students, men on camels and horsemen cheered the head of state, pledging allegiance to their President and condemning a bid from the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court for his arrest over suspected war crimes.

School pupils were recruited for the rally and one government employee in El Fasher said staff had been ordered to a disused plot of land under the beating sun.

Once they were there, the President, grinning, danced to nationalist music and repeatedly jabbed the air with a stick.

His visit comes a week after International Criminal Court prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo accused the Sudanese strongman of instructing his forces to annihilate three non-Arab groups in Darfur, masterminding murder, torture, pillaging and using rape as an instrument of genocide.

Members of those groups the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa some of whom belong to Bashir's National Congress Party, also rallied to condemn the call for an arrest warrant to be issued.

The Khartoum regime is trying to persuade the UN Security Council to freeze possible legal proceedings should judges of the court actually issue an arrest warrant, saying that to do so could jeopardise peace prospects.

Bashir told about 300 people made homeless by the five-year Darfur conflict, ''What Ocampo said about Darfur is lies ...

''We have to find a solution to the Darfur crisis. Officials said those in his audience were returning from El Fasher to their villages.

In Nyala, the President accused France where one of the main Darfur rebel leaders, Abdel Wahid Mohammed Nur, lives in exile of damaging peace efforts and ordered the release of 89 children arrested after a rebel attack on Khartoum.

''I order the authorities to release those children and take care of them and take care of their education,'' the military dictator told a crowd of thousands.

Two weeks ago, the special UN envoy on human rights in Sudan, Sima Samar, urged the Government not to prosecute the ''child rebels''.

He recommended that they should be treated as victims of war. AFP