Blocked by Sudan from visiting Darfur and refugees in neighbouring Chad, the UN's top humanitarian official has accused Khartoum of trying to hide badly deteriorating conditions there. Jan Egeland, the UN under-secretary-general for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief, on Tuesday described the reasons Sudanese officials gave for denying him access to Darfur and then overflight rights to see Darfur refugees in Chad as "utter nonsense" and suggested Khartoum had a more nefarious motive. "I think the main reason is that they don't want me to see the tens of thousands of people being displaced as we speak today," he said, speaking in Nairobi, Kenya, where he flew after being forced to cancel his trips.He blamed Omar el-Bashir, the Sudanese president, for personally preventing him from traveling north, and said that he understood Kofi Annan, the UN chief, was calling al-Bashir to protest. Egeland dismissed Khartoum's claims that his visit was inconvenient and his security could not be guaranteed, as well as claims that his Norwegian nationality posed a problem because of the uproar over cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in Norwegian newspapers. He noted that he had been barred from visiting Darfur in 2004 "when ethnic cleansing was at its worst."