France’s Foreign Ministry said a French aid worker was shot to death in eastern Chad, near the Sudanese border, the Associated Press reports. It seems gunmen opened fire on a convoy Thursday in Chad, killing Pascal Marlinge, an aid organization said. He worked for “Save The Children in Britain” organization.

“A shot, or shots, were fired by a group of armed men and Mr. Marlinge was killed,’ the aid group said in a statement. The killers were “likely bandits ... who, it appears, intercepted a convoy of three humanitarian vehicles,” one carrying Marlinge. The “Save the Children” driver and three employees of another aid agency, whose nationalities have yet to be confirmed, are believed to have escaped injury.

U.N. Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs John Holmes named the killing as “an inexcusable crime,” while French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner called the killing of Marlinge — which is the second French citizen killed in the area in two months — as an “ignoble act of barbarity.” Kouchner also asked Chadian authorities to investigate the circumstances of the killing.

“Save the Children in Britain” mentioned it was suspending its work in Chad. The organization’s spokesman Dominic Nutt said: “We have had to shut down our vital humanitarian work with refugees who desperately need health care and feeding, and that is, of course, deeply worrying.”

"Our priority is to discover how safe our staff on the ground are, and how soon we can return to normal operations in Chad,” he added, quoted by BBC News. According to several aid agencies, assaults in eastern Chad increased as fighting in Sudan’s neighboring Darfur region crosses the border.