The European Union's military force in Chad is sending a team to Sudan to recover a body which officials there believe is that of a French soldier killed after he strayed over the border, the EU force said today.
If the soldier is confirmed dead, it will be the first fatal casualty suffered by the EU force (EUFOR) since it started deploying in late January on a UN-backed mission to protect refugees and civilians in conflict-torn eastern Chad.
The French special forces soldier went missing on Monday after he and a colleague accidentally crossed the Sudanese border in a vehicle near Tissi in the remote region near the Chad, Sudan and Central African Republic frontiers.
They were fired on by Sudanese troops. The other French soldier was wounded but was able to rejoin EU forces. France and the EU have apologised to Sudan for the frontier violation.
400 Irish soldiers will deployed as part of the EU's peacekeeping mission in central Africa.
EUFOR spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Patrick Poulain said Sudanese authorities had informed EU officials that their forces had found a body in the area where the clash took place. The body was being transported to the Sudanese capital Khartoum.
"We're in the process of organising a delegation for the identification of the body in Khartoum," he said.
Ali al-Sadig, a spokesman for Sudan's Foreign Ministry, confirmed the body was in Khartoum and said the French would "confirm whether it is the missing soldier or not".
Monday's incident is embarrassing for EUFOR.
Its mission in Chad does not include trying to secure the long, porous Chad-Sudan frontier, and much less confronting Sudanese troops. The force's mandate is to protect some half a million Sudanese refugees and Chadian civilians who have fled violence spilling over from Sudan's Darfur region.
"It's unfortunate this happened now, but one of the goals of this reconnaissance is precisely to check out the terrain, especially the frontier, because the maps are rather imprecise," Poulain told Reuters by telephone.
He said the EU soldiers' crossing into Sudan had been accidental. It had occurred in a rugged bush area with no clear demarcation between the converging frontiers of Chad, Sudan and Central African Republic.