Arab militias burned down a village in West Darfur state as a warning to its non-Arab residents not to return to their homes, a man from the village said yesterday. Ibrahim Adam, 23, took a Reuters witness to the freshly burned village, southwest of El-Geneina, the capital of West Darfur state. All the about 200 homes had been razed, with blackened cooking pots and utensils lying around on the charred ground. No one was killed in Monday's attack, Adam said. The village was deserted, because all the residents had fled across the border to Chad after militias attacked about a year ago. They did not burn the village then, he said, but came back again on Monday to warn those who had returned from Chad to nearby camps that they should not try to go home. "We saw the smoke and went there. We saw the whole village was burned," he said. Adam fled Sereaf last year with his heavily pregnant wife after the Arab militias, known as Janjaweed, first attacked. He returned recently to Sudan and lives in a camp about 12 km away called Masteri.