(N’Djamena) The attack on a village by armed men in southern Chad, near the border with the Central African Republic, caused the death of 17 people on Monday, the Goré prosecutor’s office announced on Thursday, which opened an investigation. investigation.
This “mass killing” was perpetrated at 5 a.m. (00 a.m. Eastern time) on Monday when “unidentified armed individuals” attacked the village of Don, located in the province of Logone-Oriental, bordering the Central African Republic. , about 500 km south of N’Djamena, Chad’s capital, Nerambaye Ndoubamian, Chad’s public prosecutor in Goré, said in a statement.
The assailants armed with “firearms” and “bladed weapons” arrived on the spot on board “motorcycles” and “horses”, and “murdered more than a dozen villagers, set fire to huts, abducted oxen, and left in their path several wounded “, evacuated to Goré hospital, further explains the prosecution.
A total of 17 people died during this assault, including 11 “formally identified” in the village of Don, three others 3 km from the village, and three wounded – including “an infant” – who succumbed to their injuries. Other injured were taken care of in “hospital centers”, we learned from the same source.
The prosecution also announced that it had opened an investigation into the counts of murder, criminal association, arson, and aggravated theft, and issued a call for witnesses to identify the perpetrators.
The inhabitants of the village are mainly from the Kabba community, an ethnic group particularly established in Chad and neighboring Central African Republic, and whose members are mostly of Christian faith and live from agriculture.
The leader of this community in N’Djamena condemned Monday in a press release “cowardly, barbaric and despicable acts” perpetrated “under the helpless and complicit gaze of the administrative and military authorities”, and urged the resignation of several local officials.
The same day, the Episcopal Conference of Chad said it was “shocked by the recurrence of inter-community conflicts” in the south of the country.
Clashes, often very deadly, between nomadic Muslim herders and sedentary indigenous farmers, mostly Christians or animists, are very frequent in this region, but also in these fertile areas on the borders of Chad, Cameroon and the Central African Republic.
The latter notably accuse the former of ransacking their fields by grazing their animals, or even settling on what they consider to be their land.