Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – A French agronomist working for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Chad was abducted Tuesday 10 November near village of Kawa, eastern Chad, where ICRC has a primary health care assistance programme. The ICRC says Laurent Maurice was taken by several armed men, but does not know their motives nor their identities.
Seven years after his arrest in Pakistan, where he was attending a mosque, 21-year-old Mohammed El Gharani, a citizen of Chad, has been released fro Guantanamo Bay and sent home to Chad, his lawyers say. The US government has not confirmed the information. El Gharani was 14 when he was arrested on suspicion of “of staying in an al Qaeda-affiliated guest house in Afghanistan, of fighting in the battle of Tora Bora, serving as a courier for senior al Qaeda operatives, and being a member of a London-based al Qaeda cell,” reports Reuters, and he was turned over to US officials in Afghanistan. The charges were never proven and a judge ordered in January 2009 that he should be freed.
Médecins Sans Frontières has begun a campaign to vaccinate 500,000 people in Nigeria against meningitis, part of a major campaign to fight an outbreak of the dangerous infectious disease in Nigeria, Niger and Chad that has killed hundreds of people since 2008.
