The attack on a village by armed men in southern Chad, near the border with the Central African Republic, left 17 people dead on Monday, the Gore prosecutor’s office said on Thursday, opening an investigation.

The “mass killing” was perpetrated Monday at 5:00 am (4:00 am GMT) when “unidentified armed individuals” attacked the village of Don, located in the province of Logone-Oriental, bordering the Central African Republic, about 500 km south of N’Djamena, the capital of Chad, said Nerambaye Ndoubamian, the prosecutor of Chad in Gore in a statement.

The assailants, armed with “firearms” and “bladed weapons”, arrived on the scene on “motorbikes” and “horses”, and “murdered more than a dozen villagers, set fire to huts, kidnapped oxen, and left several wounded”, who were evacuated to the hospital in Goré, the Prosecutor’s Office explained.