Chad’s President Idriss Deby is dead, He was reportedly shot dead while visiting troops on the front line of a fight against northern rebels
According to the army, Idriss Deby was killed over the weekend.
Chad’s army announced his death on state television, according to report monitored on BBC.
Mr Déby “breathed his last defending the sovereign nation on the battlefield”, an army general said in a statement read out on state TV.
He had gone to the front line at the weekend to visit troops battling rebels based across the border in Libya.
The rebels, from a group calling itself Fact (the Front for Change and Concord in Chad), attacked a border post on election day.
They were advancing on the capital, N’Djamena, several hundred kilometres to the south. The clashes with the army began on Saturday. An army general told Reuters news agency that 300 insurgents were killed and 150 captured.
Five government soldiers were killed and 36 were injured, he said. The figures could not immediately be verified. Mr Déby was a long-time ally of France and other Western powers in the battle against jihadist groups in the Sahel region of Africa.
However, there has been growing unhappiness over his government’s management of Chad’s oil resources.
Meanwhile, a military council is expected to govern for the next 18 months.
The military council will be led by the late president’s son, Mahamat Idriss Déby Itno, 37, a four-star general.
The murdered President came to power in an armed uprising in 1990.