SHAD: Chad’s President Idriss Deby, who ruled his country for over 30 years, has been killed on the frontline against rebels in North Africa, Army spokesman Azem Bermendao Agouna announced on Tuesday.
The Army spokesman said, “A call to dialogue and peace is launched to all Chadians in the country and abroad in order to continue to build Chad together,”
The National Council of Transition reassures the Chadian people that all steps have been taken to guarantee peace, security and the republican order, said Agouna.
The general said that Deby had been taken to the capital after being wounded in a battle where he succumbed to his injuries.
Deby’s son, Mahamat Kaka, was named interim president by a transitional council of military officers, Azem Bermendao Agouna said in a broadcast on state television.
In 1990, Deby came to power in a rebellion and was one of Africa’s longest-ruling leaders, surviving numerous coup attempts and rebellions.
His death was announced the day after he was declared the winner of a presidential election that would have given him a sixth term in office. Most of the opposition, which had long complained of his repressive rule, boycotted the vote.
Deby – who often joined soldiers on the battlefront in his military fatigues – visited troops on the frontline on Monday after rebels based across the northern frontier in Libya advanced hundreds of km (miles) south toward the capital N’Djamena.
Déby had joined the army in the 1970s when Chad was going through a long-running civil war. He received military training in France and returned to Chad in 1978, throwing his support behind President Hissène Habré and eventually becoming commander in chief of the armed forces.
He seized power in 1990, leading a rebel army swathed in desert headgear in a three-week offensive launched from neighboring Sudan to topple Habre, a man accused of instigating tens of thousands of political murders.
