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| Africa Subsaharan |
| Saharan manhunt under way for killer legionnaire |
| 2009-04-08 |
| Update... NDJAMENA (AFP) — Helicopters led an international military manhunt Wednesday for an armed French foreign legionnaire who killed four people in Chad and fled across the southern Sahara on a stolen horse. "The guy is dangerous because he is armed and he has a psychological problem," a French military source told AFP on condition of anonymity. "He will have been trained in desert survival techniques, which will make it all the harder to find him." The private soldier, attached to a European force in the central African desert state, killed two fellow legionnaires late Tuesday plus a Togolese soldier operating within a UN force that is taking over peacekeeping operations. The killings took place inside their military camp, with the runaway legionnaire then shooting a Chadian farmer dead for his horse and taking flight between Abeche and Guereda in north-eastern Chad towards Sudan, his superiors said. UN agencies highly active in the Abeche region, where camps are home to some 450,000 Sudanese refugees and displaced Chadians, have ordered the local staff to avoid travel because of the risk of running into the renegade. "We have been asked not to move. We've warned our partners in the field," Annette Rehrl of the UH High Commissioner for Refugees office in Abeche told AFP. French Defence Minister Herve Morin told France Info radio that soldiers are searching for the unnamed man "with everything at our disposal" including help from the Chadian authorities, but that they had yet to locate his whereabouts. Helicopters were scouring the arid terrain -- with just enough trees to enable him to hide from daylight aerial surveillance -- as troops from EUFOR, the UN's MINURCAT mission and Chad, as well as local police, hunted the fugitive. The French military source said the legionnaire could last several days on the run even in such harsh conditions."We teach them to last several days in difficult conditions and he will be better equipped than a cadet fresh out of university, but we're not talking about Rambo, or the type you see in certain films," the source stressed. Morin said the authorities had no explanation for the soldier's killing spree "other than that he flipped." He described the man's actions as "totally out of order and intolerable." The minister insisted that the soldier had undergone a series of psychiatric tests before being accepted into the Legion in February 2007 and that none of the examinations had hinted at such potential behaviour. "His marks were good," Morin added. Captain Christophe Prazuck of the French military high command described the man as "deranged" on Tuesday. "Gunshots were heard in the (military) camp and then the two legionnaires were found and then a little further away the body of the Togolese soldier was discovered," he said. Within Abeche, "life is going on as normal," a local civil servant told AFP. "Most of the people here haven't been informed of this incident." |
| Posted by:tu3031 |