On 26 March, a policeman informed Ariek Piol, a Dinka community leader, that an attack was imminent. He advised the Dinkas to leave Dhein. A few heeded him on Friday morning. Most did not. The police also summoned Dinka leaders that day to advise them to stay home and avoid large gatherings. The police force was on alert from 25 March onward. One Dinka survivor, Agol Akol, had overheard a conversation four days earlier about expelling the Dinkas from Dhein. She reported what she had heard. She was not believed. On the morning of the massacre, the warnings had arrived. The mechanisms of response - flee, gather together, trust the police, stay apart - all failed in different ways. A thousand ordinary people would discover which failures cost more than others.

The attack began at the church during evening prayers. The Muraheleen - a militia drawn primarily from the Baggara Arab Rizeigat tribe, armed and encouraged by the al-Mahdi government as part of its war against the southern SPLA - entered while services were underway. They opened fire on the worshippers. Then they or another group moved on nearby Dinka homes, setting fire to several houses and killing at least five more people. The numbers that Friday night were not yet in the hundreds. Survivors scattered. Some hid with sympathetic families in Dhein itself. Others sought refuge in Hillat Sikka Hadid, a neighborhood near the town's railway station, where the remaining police presence was said to offer protection. They believed they would be safe there.

On Saturday morning, 28 March, officials decided to evacuate the Dinkas by train. They were moved from Hillat Sikka Hadid to the railway station and placed in eight railway wagons, with others kept in the station's police center. Then the Muraheleen came back, joined by large numbers of other Dhein residents - mostly Rizeigat. They stormed the railway station. By sunset on Saturday more than a thousand Dinkas were dead. Survivors were transported onward to Nyala by train. Rizeigat Arabs kidnapped and enslaved an unknown number of Dinka children and women during and after the killings. This was not rumor; Sudan Relief and Rehabilitation Association investigators later confirmed the enslavement and the sale of captives. Slavery had re-emerged in the region since 1986, supported by the al-Mahdi government's war policies. What happened at the Dhein railway station was the ghastliest single moment of that resurgence.

During the massacre, the police largely abandoned their posts. Many left when the violence began. Eyewitnesses described a policeman in traditional attire actively participating in the killings, including the murder of Deng Alwel, a Dinka chief. Some officers extorted money from Dinkas - 5 Sudanese pounds for protection. About thirty Dinkas paid. Deputy Chief of Police Ali al-Manna was in shock and retreated to his office, unable to issue coherent orders. One officer, Abdel-Rahman al-Fideili - himself a Rizeigat - actively defended the Dinkas by shooting at the attackers. The Interior Minister later estimated the toll at 183. The Governor of Bahr el-Ghazal, William Ajal Deng, estimated fewer than 300. An unnamed official told the Al Ayam newspaper the toll was only 14. The Sudan Relief and Rehabilitation Association's investigation documented over a thousand. Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi's official explanation attributed the deaths to a revenge attack by the SPLA - an explanation the investigators flatly rejected.

Dhein - formally Ed Daein - in 1987 had a population of about 60,000. It was the principal town of eastern southern Darfur, a place where Rizeigat, Zaghawa, Dinka, Barti, and Hausa communities lived in proximity that ordinary times made ordinary. The rising tensions of the mid-1980s - economic pressure, the civil war to the south, the government's decision to arm tribal militias against the SPLA, ideological hardening within the Rizeigat community - made ordinary impossible. The victims of Dhein have names even when the records do not always preserve them. Deng Alwel. Ariek Piol's community. The twenty-five worshippers at the church. The hundreds who trusted the railway station to evacuate them. From the air today, Ed Daein appears as a small Darfurian town along a seasonal watercourse, with the old rail line still visible running northwest toward Nyala and beyond.