19:48 19/06/2015
N'djamena - Chad said on Friday it planned to round up beggars
and some foreigners as part of a security clamp-down, days after two
suicide attacks on its capital blamed on Boko Haram Islamist militants
from neighbouring Nigeria.
The apparently coordinated blasts in
two police offices on Monday killed 34 people and injured dozens in the
largest attack of its kind in the Central African nation.
Chad's
Prime Minister Kalzeube Pahimi Deubet said on Friday the detained
beggars and foreigners would be held in a centre in Baga Sola, a town
near Lake Chad, close to the Nigerian border. He did not go into further
detail on how the round-up would improve security or the nationality of
the foreigners.
Deubet
also said that boating and fishing would be banned on parts of the
River Chari that flows into the Lake Chad. Boko Haram militants have
launched several deadly attacks around the lake, often arriving in
motorised canoes from Nigeria.
Chad has played a leading role in
helping Nigerian forces win back territory from Boko Haram, which has
mounted a six-year insurgency to carve out an Islamist caliphate in
Nigeria's northeast and attacked that region's other neighbours - Niger
and Cameroon.
Chad, whose capital is a command centre for a
regional anti-Boko Haram task force, has already made at least five
arrests. It banned religious head-to-toe burqas earlier this week on the
grounds that they might be used as camouflage by militants, though
residents say people on the streets of N'Djamena have continued wearing
them.
Chad has also said it retaliated with air strikes against
Boko Haram positions soon after the attacks, though a military spokesman
in Nigeria denied this.
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