Sudan's leading university ordered all of its faculties closed after a three-week protest movement against the Islamist government turned increasingly violent.The University of Khartoum authorities decided to close the university "immediately and indefinitely" to protect both students and buildings scattered across the capital region, Vice Chancellor Abdel Malik Mohammed Abdel Rahman said Thursday.

Clashes erupted Wednesday at two faculties when students loyal to secular opposition groups tried to prevent supporters of President Omar al-Beshir's National Congress party from going to classes, witnesses said.

The students have led a strike that has closed five of some dozen faculties since a riot erupted last month at a rally commemorating student protests which eventually toppled a military dictatorship in 1967.

Their main demand is for the authorities to re-establish student unions that were suspended four years ago, when opposition groups appeared poised to win campus elections.

Abdel Rahman said the violence occurred despite his announcement that the union elections would go ahead on January 15.

Students "used knives and Molotov cocktails against each other" during Wednesday's clashes at faculties in Khartoum North and the capital's the twin city of Omdurman, Abdel Rahman said in a statement.

Several students were injured and taken to hospitals in the area, he added.

In one incident, students set ablaze the offices of the body that runs student boarding houses to try to stop its Islamic preaching program for the holy month of Ramadan, said the body's director Hussein Suleiman Mohamed.

He said the protestors argued the program would undermine unity at the university, which is attended by some 18,000 students from all over Sudan, including animists and Christians from the south.

The protesters at the education faculty in Omdurman also attacked both the imam of the faculty's mosque and the supervisor of the boarding houses, who had to be taken to hospital for treatment of his injuries, Abdel Rahman said.

The turmoil began on October 22 when police intervened to disband a celebration by the students marking the 35th anniversary of a popular upheaval that overthrew the military dictatorship of Ibrahim Aboud.

It continued with student accusations of police brutality that the authorities have promised to investigate.

General Beshir himself seized power here in 1989 in a military coup backed by a leading Islamist, Hassan al-Turabi, who has since formed his own fundamentalist opposition party and been put under house arrest.

Beshir has lately called for political reconciliation and an end to the 19-year civil war between successive Arab and Muslim governments in the north and the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) in the south.

Northern opposition groups joined the battle against the government in 1995.

The government and SPLA reached a breakthrough agreement mapping a road to peace during negotiations in Kenya on July 20, but there have been numerous flare-ups of fighting on the southern and eastern fronts since then.

PHOTO CAPTION

Sudanese President Omar al-Beshir