George Clooney arrested outside Sudan embassy in D.C.

Update: According to a tweet from the EnoughProject, Clooney has since been released

Actor George Clooney was arrested on Friday outside the Sudanese embassy in Washington, D.C.

Clooney, a longtime human rights activist, was handcuffed and taken to jail after he refused a police order vacate the private property.

According to MSNBC, journalist Nick Clooney, who is George Clooney's father, was also arrested along with Martin Luther King III, NAACP President Ben Jealous, Rep Jim McGovern (D-MA) and Rep. Jim Moran (D-VA) and former Rep. Tom Andrews (D-MA).

The group was demonstrating against Sudan for blocking the Nuba Mountains area of the country from receiving food and aid.

"They were protesting the violence committed by the government of Sudan on its own innocent men, women and children," a representative for Clooney said. "They were demanding they allow humanitarian aid into the country before it becomes the largest humanitarian crisis in the world."

Clooney met with President Barack Obama two days after returning from a clandestine trip to Sudan's mountainous South Kordofan region, which is facing famine due to bombings by government forces that have impeded agricultural production.

On Wednesday, the United States urged Sudan to allow in food shipments immediately to avert a humanitarian disaster, as Clooney accused the Khartoum government of war crimes.

The "Ocean's Eleven" star said he saw hundreds of people running to the hills or hiding in caves due to the omnipresent buzzing of Antonov planes, from which Sudanese forces manually dump notoriously inaccurate bombs.

Clooney, who is seeking to end what the United States has called genocide in Sudan's western Darfur region, said South Kordofan was "ominously similar."

He argued that President Omar al-Bashir and his aides are "proving themselves to be the greatest war criminals of this century by far."

Watch this video from MSNBC, broadcast March 16, 2012.

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-- with AFP