EU troops searching Chad for aid worker's killers

PARIS—European peacekeepers in Chad are searching for the killers of a French aid worker shot in the head by bandits, France's foreign minister said Friday.

Pascal Marlinge, who worked for the British charity Save the Children, died immediately Thursday when armed gunmen opened fire on a convoy of vehicles traveling in eastern Chad near the Sudanese border, Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said.

Marlinge was the second French citizen killed in the region in two months. In March, Sudanese soldiers killed a French peacekeeper whose vehicle strayed across the badly marked Sudanese-Chadian border.

Kouchner suggested that military patrols could be called on to escort humanitarian groups as they move about the volatile east African nation.

European troops "are mobilized" and are searching for Marlinge's killers, who fled in a charity vehicle later found abandoned near the border, Kouchner told France's RTL radio from London, where he was attending talks on the Middle East.

The EU peacekeeping force, known as EUFOR, is being deployed to protect refugees flooding into Chad from the war-torn Darfur region of neighboring Sudan as well as Chadians uprooted by the conflict.

"EUFOR is going to secure the region as best as possible," Kouchner said.

Save the Children has suspended its work in Chad.