N’Djamena: Scores of police and soldiers patrolled Chad’s capital on Tuesday, a day after twin suicide bombings blamed on Boko Haram militants killed 24 people and wounded more than 100.
The areas around the presidential palace and police headquarters in N’Djamena — one of the targets of the bombers — were sealed off, checkpoints were set up across the city and vehicles with smoked glass windows banned from the roads, journalists reported.
Chad has been on the front line of a regional fight against the Nigerian Islamist group, but Monday’s attack marked the first of its kind in the capital of the north-central African country.
“These attacks, which aimed to strike fear into the people, will not slacken Chad’s determination to combat terrorism,” the government said, calling on the population to “keep its legendary serenity because the situation is entirely under control.”
It said four “terrorists” were also killed in the blasts, but did not give details.
Although Boko Haram has yet to claim responsibility for the suicide bombings, which also targeted a police academy, both Chad and France accused the militants of being behind the “barbaric attack”.
“There is no doubt that Boko Haram is responsible and will be brought to justice for this new humanitarian horror,” French President Francois Hollande said during a visit to Algiers, where the regional threat posed by jihadists was high on the agenda.
Abubakar Shekau, the leader of the fundamentalist movement, has threatened several times to attack Chad and other countries that have joined forces to fight Boko Haram.
Boko Haram has been waging a six-year campaign of violence in northeastern Nigeria that has left at least 15,000 people dead and increasingly spilt across borders.
President Mahamadou Issoufou of neighbouring Niger firmly condemned “these acts of unspeakable cruelty” in a statement read late Monday on state television.
Issoufou urged the international community to back member states of the Lake Chad Basin Commission in a joint struggle against Boko Haram, which on April 25 killed 74 people, including 28 civilians, in a raid inside Niger.
That attack against a military outpost on Lake Chad, where regional borders converge, also left 32 people missing, making it the bloodiest assault against Niger since it entered the fray against the militants.
Nigeria, Chad, Niger, Benin and Cameroon agreed last week to set up a regional task force of 8,700 soldiers, police officers and civilians, based in N’Djamena, to combat Boko Haram.
Months before that decision, troops from Chad and Niger began a ground and air offensive on Nigerian soil and took back big swathes of territory from the Islamists, whose name loosely translates as “Western education is forbidden”.
The movement is believed still to be holding more than 200 schoolgirls abducted in a raid on a state school at Chibok in northeastern Borno State in April 2014.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, in a statement, condemned Monday’s twin attacks and praised Chad “for its courageous role in the fight against Boko Haram”.
He also welcomed progress on sending an African Union-backed multinational force to tackle the insurgents.
Chad’s capital hosts the headquarters of a French counter-terrorism force, Operation Barkhane, which operates in the Sahel region, a broad band of arid territory stretching across the southern edge of the Sahara.AFP
