A rocket fired from Sudan caused damage in a Chadian border town, local authorities said, a day after Chad closed its shared border to prevent its neighbor’s conflict from spilling over.
“The centre of Tine was hit yesterday by a rocket coming from Sudan,” Youssouf Hachim Abdoulaye, head of the Tine prefecture, told AFP on Wednesday.
Several homes and part of the town’s police station were destroyed, he added.
The explosion, which occurred around 5:30 pm (1630 GMT) on Tuesday, caused no casualties, according to the local official, who said the strike was “probably accidental.”
Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces have been fighting government troops for almost three years in a conflict that has killed tens of thousands of people.
It has forced 11 million people to flee their homes, triggering what the UN says is one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
The paramilitaries have conducted several operations near the Chad border, leaving soldiers and civilians dead.
Eight Chadians died and around 10 were injured between Friday and Sunday because of stray bullets fired from Sudan, the prefecture noted.
The RSF last year consolidated its hold over Sudan’s western Darfur region, leaving only enclaves outside its control.
It advanced on the frontier again on Saturday, claiming to have captured the border town of Al-Tina before army-allied militias said they had repelled the attack.
Many of the town’s residents have already fled to Tine on the Chadian side, where tens of thousands of Sudanese have sought safety since the war broke out.
Chad on Monday said it was closing the border with Sudan until further notice, following a rise in clashes between its soldiers and armed groups involved in the civil war across the frontier.
