The President of Chad, Idriss Deby was on Tuesday killed while visiting troops on the front line of a fight against northern rebels, an army spokesperson said Tuesday, less than 48 hours after Deby was declared the winner of the sixth term in office.
The official statement read over the weekend by army spokesperson General Azem Bermandoa Agouna which was read out on state television stated that the 68-year-old ‘has just breathed his last defending the sovereign nation on the battlefield’.
The army said a military council led by the late president’s 37-year-old son Mahamat Idriss Deby Itno, a four-star general, would replace him.
Deby won a sixth term on Monday, as the army said it had beaten back a column of insurgents advancing on the capital, N’Djamena. Deby, who came to power in a rebellion in 1990, took 79.3% of the vote in the April 11 election, which was boycotted by top opposition leaders.
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He was expected to give a victory speech to supporters, but his campaign director, Mahamat Zen Bada, said he had instead gone to visit Chadian soldiers on the front lines.
‘The candidate would have liked to have been here to celebrate… but right now, he is alongside our valiant defence and security forces to fight the terrorists threatening our territory,’ Zen Bada told reporters.
The rebel group Front for Change and Concord in Chad (FACT), which is based across the northern frontier with Libya, attacked a border post on election day and then advanced hundreds of kilometers (miles) south.
But it suffered a setback over the weekend. Agouna told Reporters that army troops killed more than 300 insurgents and captured 150 on Saturday in Kanem province, around 300 kilometers (185 miles) from N’Djamena.
AFRICA TODAY NEWS, NEW YORK