* Attack reported a day after north-south meeting
* South official accuses nomads of trying to occupy land
KHARTOUM, March 5 (Reuters) - Militias burned down a village in Sudan&${esc.hash}39;s contested Abyei region on Saturday, a southern official said.
The incident occurred the day after northern and southern leaders met to end fighting that according to one report has killed more than 100 people.
"The militias went to Tajalei. They burned all the tukuls (huts) that they found there," Charles Abyei, speaker of the area&${esc.hash}39;s administration from the Dinka Ngok, told Reuters.
"It shows...the intention of the government of trying to occupy the whole area. That is why they are displacing the population from all directions. The villagers in northern part of Abyei are displaced," he said.
The inhabitants of Tajalei village had fled after hearing rumours of an attack, and no one was injured, Abyei said.
The United Nations Security Council has expressed its "deep concern" about this week&${esc.hash}39;s surge of violence in the central, fertile Abyei region, claimed by both north and south Sudan.
Ownership of the territory remains one of the biggest bones of contention between the two halves of the country in the build up to the secession of the oil-producing south, expected to take place on July 9.
Southerners, who mostly follow Christianity and traditional beliefs, voted overwhelmingly to declare independence in a January referendum promised in a 2005 peace deal that ended decades of civil war with the Muslim north.
Abyei&${esc.hash}39;s status was left undecided in the accord, stoking tensions between northern Arab Misseriya nomads and south-linked Dinka Ngok people who both use the area.
U.N. peacekeepers received reports of the attack and had sent out a patrol to check, spokeswoman Hua Jiang said.
SPLA spokesman Philip Aguer said more than 100 southern police officers had died in fighting that began in villages north of Abyei town on Sunday.
"We earlier reported 70, and 36 were reported later on," he said.
Senior northern and southern government leaders met in Abyei on Friday and set up a committee to enforce an earlier peace deal.
Abyei repeated earlier allegations that the Misseriya were fighting along side the Popular Defence Force (PDF) militia, a force backed by the northern government in Khartoum.
No one was immediately available for comment from the Misseriya or Khartoum. Both have denied similar accusations before. The Misseriya this week accused south Sudan&${esc.hash}39;s army, the SPLA, of starting the fighting.
Sudan&${esc.hash}39;s north-south civil war, fought over ethnicity, ideology, oil and religion, killed an estimated 2 million people and forced 4 million to flee.
(Reporting by Andrew Heavens; editing by Michael Roddy)
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