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President Idriss Deby (Photo: Wikimedia.org)
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President Idriss Deby of Chad on
Wednesday called on Boko Haram leader, Abubakar Shekau, to surrender or face
death. The Chadian leader disclosed at a news conference in
N’djamena, that he knows the whereabouts of Shekau, who, according to him, was
sighted in Dikwa, a village in Borno State two days ago.
The Punch reports:
“Abubakar Shekau must surrender. We
know where he is. If he doesn’t give himself up he will suffer the same fate as
his compatriots. He (Shekau) was in Dikwa two days
ago. He managed to get away but we know where he is. It’s in his interests to
surrender,” President Deby charged.
Chadian troops earlier this week
liberated the village which is about 85 kilometres away from Maiduguri, the
Borno State capital from Boko Haram.
During a battle for the village, the
Chadian soldiers killed over 100 Boko Haram insurgents. The
insurgents were said to have fled to a huge building where they
were found inside wardrobes by the troops, who fired volleys of
bullets at them.
But in an apparent last act of
defiance, a suicide bomber among the fighters climbed into a truck carrying gas
canisters and blew it up, killing a Chadian soldier and injuring 34.
A Chadian soldier told a
Reuters reporter visiting the town after fighting subsided, that the building
was Boko Haram’s command centre.
“They came to hide here as we
advanced,” the soldier said, pointing to the bodies in the wardrobes.
The Chadian army spokesman, Col.
Azem Bermandoa, who confirmed the killings, said his men chased those who
escaped about 15 kilometres out of the town, where many walls
were sprayed with bullets and most houses lay deserted.
According to the report, the
Nigerian military had listed Dikwa as one of the towns it wanted to liberate
from the insurgents before the general elections.
Chadian forces had planned to take
the town last month, but were ordered back by the Nigeria military, which said
it planned to attack it.
But a Chadian soldier in Dikwa claimed that the
closest Nigerian soldiers got to the town as of the time of the latest
development was 50 kilometres.
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