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Foreigners flee Chad violence
03/02/2008 13:20 - (SA)
Ndjamena - New heavy fighting rocked the Chad capital on Sunday as rebels surrounded President Idriss Deby Itno in his palace and hundreds of foreigners fled the country.
With international aid organisations reporting bodies in the streets and looting in the capital, anti-tank and automatic weapons fire was heard around the presidential palace, where Deby has been holed up since Friday.
French Defence Minister Herve Morin said the new fighting could be "crucial" in the battle for control of the former French colony in West Africa.
The rebel campaign has opened up a new conflict next to Sudan's strife torn Darfur region and the deployment of a planned European peacekeeping mission to Chad and neighbouring Central African Republic has been suspended, Morin said in Paris.
Foreigners flee
France airlifted 397 French, Germans, Belgians, Spanish, Portuguese, Egyptian and Armenian nationals out of Ndjamena in a series of night-time military flights, the French chiefs of staff said.
About 560 foreigners were still at three emergency assembly points in the city, a top military official in Paris added. The United Nations said it would evacuated all UN personnel.
US embassy staff were taken to the French military base at Ndjamena airport on Sunday to be flown out, military sources said.
China, a major investor in Chad's growing oil industry, was organising an airlift for 210 Chinese and two Taiwan nationals to Cameroon, China's official Xinhua news agency reported.
But Deby refused a French offer to help him leave the country, though French officials insisted the offer would remain open.
France sent an extra 150 troops to help with the evacuations and French President Nicolas Sarkozy broke off from celebrating his wedding on Saturday to twice telephone Deby.
Bodies in the streets
No death toll from the fighting has been given but a UN security official said there were a lot of bodies in the streets, "some burned, some just hacked" to death.
Military sources said Chadian army helicopters had taken off from their airport base and attacked a rebel column attempting to make a breakthrough in the south of the city where the national radio station is located.
French Mirage jets were also flying over the city.
"We did not take the airport so as not to hinder the evacuation of foreign nationals and now the French army is letting these helicopters take off and attack us," a rebel spokesperson, Abderaman Khoulamallah, told AFP.
The new fighting dashed hopes of a ceasefire which Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was reportedly trying to secure.
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