Chad’s National Human Rights Commission (NCHR) estimates that the death toll from the bloody crackdown on opposition protests in October against the extension of the political transition period was actually 128 dead, according to its report, a copy of which was received by the possession of the French Agency.

On October 20, 2022, mass opposition demonstrations against the two-year extension of the transitional president, General Mahamat Idriss Debi Itno, were extinguished in blood in Djamena, the capital, and other cities in the country.

Initially, the authorities announced that “there are about fifty dead”, the vast majority of them young people who were killed when law enforcement forces opened fire in the capital, before revising to speak of 73 dead. Non-governmental organizations called the official tally greatly underestimated.

“The official numbers (…) differ from those arrived at by the National Human Rights Commission after its investigations,” the report says, clarifying that its work focused “on the towns most affected by the repression, especially Djamena, the Mundu, the Doba, the Qumra and the Sar’.

According to EEAD researchers, 943 people were arrested, another 435 were imprisoned and 12 disappeared. The EEAD “attributes the main responsibility for the human rights violations to state officials, i.e. the DA (including the security forces), who clearly violated their duties during the course of events”, the text underlines.

On that “Black Thursday,” a total of 621 people, according to the government, were arrested and interned at Koro Toro, a maximum-security prison in the middle of the desert, 600 kilometers from Djamena. They were then brought to a mass trial, with no lawyers or independent media present at the proceedings, after a month and a half of detention.

“Four bodies of people who died en route arrived in Coro Toro, while eight others (detainees) died because of the ill-treatment” they suffered in that prison, the Commission said.

The EEAD, established in 2019, has the mission of protecting and promoting human rights and reports to the government, the president of the republic and the parliament.