U.N. officials and diplomats announced that the head prosecutor of the International Criminal Court would request a detain warrant on Monday for Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, accusing him of genocide and crimes against humanity in the orchestration of a campaign of aggression that caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of individuals in the nation’s Darfur province during the past five years.

The measure taken by the prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo of Argentina, will designate the first time that the court in The Hague incriminates a sitting head of state with such accusations, and represents a significant progress made by the court in order to connect the highest levels of the Sudanese government to the massacres in Darfur.

Several U.N. officials showed unease on Thursday regarding the fact that the verdict would cause the peace process in Darfur difficulties, possibly generating a military reaction by Sudanese forces in opposition to the almost 10,000 U.N. and African Union peacekeepers positioned there. At least seven peacekeepers were murdered and 22 were wounded on Tuesday during an ambush organized by an efficient, but still unidentified armed group.

Sudan's U.N. ambassador, Abdalmahmood Abdalhaleem Mohamad, said that rebels are to be blamed for the attack on U.N. peacekeepers, and declared that Sudanese forces will not strike back against foreign peacekeepers. Nevertheless, he alerted that the announcement of accusations against President Bashir or other senior officials would annihilate international efforts to attain a peace agreement in Darfur.

The violent attacks in Darfur began in February 2003 when two rebel groups assaulted Sudan’s Islamic government, alleging examples of unfairness concerning the region’s black African tribes. Khartoum started off a local Arab militia, known as the Janjaweed, and carried out an atrocious counterinsurgency campaign that has killed more than 300,000 people and has forced more than 2 million to evacuate their homes.