03/04/2021
CEIA- Central Ethiopia intelligence agency
War Crime on Tigrayan civilian in Ethiopia
Tigray massacre video raises questions for Ethiopian Army
https://youtu.be/pkp3wqZTrj8
https://youtu.be/k7-0pz5RjVc
In early March, a series of five video clips surfaced on social media showing armed, uniformed men leading a group of unarmed men to the edge of a cliff, shooting some at point blank range, and pushing dead bodies over the cliff.
The BBC has confirmed that the massacre took place close to the town of Mahbere D**o in Ethiopia's northern Tigray region, where the Ethiopian army is fighting the forces of the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), previously the region's ruling party.
The fighting began last November when the government launched a military offensive against the TPLF, which Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed accused of attacking a government military base. The TPLF is opposed to efforts by Mr Abiy to increase the power of the federal government, and has said it is committed to "extended resistance".
The conflict has so far displaced more than two million people, according to Tigray's interim administration, and left more than four million people in need of aid.
The first people to post the clips to social media claimed they were filmed near Mahbere D**o. Africa Eye analysed geographical features seen in the videos, including a dirt road, a plateau, and an escarpment with a distinctive profile, and compared them with satellite imagery of the area around the town.
The direction and length of shadows cast by the armed men helped to pinpoint the likely time of day and showed that the escarpment was oriented north-south, allowing Africa Eye to identify a likely location.
A ridgeline in the video footage was then overlaid on a topographical map of the location to confirm it was an exact match. A dry riverbed, band of vegetation, and pattern of trees further confirmed the match.
The BBC spoke by phone to a resident of Mahbere D**o, who said the Ethiopian army took away 73 men from the town and surrounding area in January this year, including three of his relatives. He said none of them had been heard from since.
The BBC also spoke to a resident in a neighbouring village who said that his brother was among those killed in this massacre. He said that the killings took place in Mahbere D**o, and gave the same month: January 2021 - the government had declared victory in the conflict in November.
"They killed them at the cliff," he said.
Identifying the armed men and victims
Africa Eye was not able to confirm the identities of the armed men seen in the video footage, but the details of their uniforms - including the camouflage pattern and arm badge in the colour of the Ethiopian flag - appear to match those worn by the Ethiopian National Defence Force (ENDF).
Other features also match the ENDF uniform, including the cut and style of the pockets. One of the armed men wears a green beret bearing an insignia that appears to closely match the colour and insignia of the ENDF beret.
'Two bullets is enough'
Dawit was watching television at a relative's one-room apartment in Axum, a historic city in Ethiopia's war-torn, northern Tigray region, in early March when a news bulletin flashed up on the screen.
Graphic, unverified footage had surfaced of a mass killing near Dawit's hometown of Mahibere D**o, in a mountainous area of central Tigray. In the shaky video Ethiopian soldiers appeared to round up a group of young, unarmed men on a wind-swept, dusty ledge before shooting them at point-blank range -- picking them up by an arm or a leg and flinging or kicking their bodies off a rocky hillside like ragdolls.
The soldiers can be heard in the footage urging one another not to waste bullets, to use the minimum amount needed to kill and to make sure none of the group were left alive. They also appear to cheer each other on, praising the killings as heroic and hurling insults at the men in their captivity.
Dawit said he believes one of the men in the video, broadcast on a diaspora television station Tigrai Media House (TMH), was his younger brother, Alula. CNN has changed the names of both brothers for Dawit's safety.
The mass killing near Mahibere D**o is one of several to have been reported over the course of Ethiopia's five-month-old conflict during which thousands of civilians are believed to have been killed, r***d and abused. But with independent access to journalists severely restricted until recently and telephone and internet services often blocked, it has been challenging to verify accounts of atrocities in Tigray. Amid the effective communications blackout, few videos have emerged from the fighting and those that have are difficult to authenticate.
Through a forensic frame-by-frame investigation of the video footage -- corroborated by analysis from Amnesty International's digital verification and modeling experts -- as well as interviews with 10 family members and local residents, CNN has established that men wearing Ethiopian army uniforms executed a group of at least 11 unarmed men before disposing of their bodies near Mahibere D**o.
Footage obtained by CNN shows soldiers rounding up dozens of young men on a clifftop and checking if they're armed. Credit: Tigrai Media House
Dawit said he last saw his 23-year-old brother -- in the same clothes he is seen wearing in the video -- at their mother's house in Mahibere D**o on January 15. The video is not timestamped and CNN does not have the original, raw footage to examine the file's metadata but it is likely the video was filmed that same day.
Dawit was out in the fields looking after his cattle when he said Ethiopian soldiers arrived in the town and went door-to-door dragging young men, including his brother, from their homes.
The troops shot at him, Dawit said, and he ran into the bush to escape, breaking his leg as he scrambled down a rocky path. Later, he said he could hear gunfire in the distance, and then silence.
Until he watched the video, he said he had no idea what had happened to his brother. But even after watching the footage countless times, Dawit said he is still holding out hope Alula is alive.
CNN is not able to independently verify that Alula is pictured in the footage, and the man that Dawit identifies as his brother is not identifiable among the dead.
"Since we didn't see his body with our own eyes and bury our brother ourselves, it's hard for us to believe he's dead. It feels like he's still alive, we can't accept his death," Dawit said.
"We will always remember him."
After the attack, Dawit fled Mahibere D**o with two of his teenage siblings, limping 12 miles to their eldest brother's home in Axum; hundreds of other residents displaced from the town and surrounding area are now sleeping rough in the city's streets.
Dawit said the only people left in the town are those too elderly to make the trek -- including his own mother. She doesn't have internet access or satellite TV, so she hasn't seen the gruesome video. Dawit has spoken to her over the phone -- telephone networks in Mahibere D**o have been intermittent -- but he hasn't mentioned the footage. For now, he said, it is easier that way.
Ethiopia is facing a raft of intense scrutiny over human rights violations that may amount to war crimes in its Tigray region. Thousands of civilians are believed to have been killed since November, when Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed launched a major military operation against Tigray's ruling party, the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), sending in national troops and militia fighters from Ethiopia's Amhara region.
CNN has previously compiled extensive eyewitness testimony that soldiers from neighboring Eritrea had crossed into Tigray and were perpetrating massacres, extrajudicial killings, s*xual violence and other abuses.
The state-appointed Ethiopian Human Rights Commission last week said its investigations found preliminary evidence that more than 100 people in Axum were killed by Eritrean soldiers in November, confirming earlier reports by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
In late March, Medecins Sans Frontieres said its staffers had witnessed Ethiopian soldiers drag several men off public buses and execute them near the Tigray capital, Mekelle.
Abiy said last week his government would hold accountable any soldier found responsible for committing atrocities in Tigray -- acknowledging for the first time that Eritrean troops were fighting alongside Ethiopian forces and that they would withdraw from border areas. It is not clear whether Eritrean forces have pulled out of Tigray.
The Eritrean embassy of the UK and Ireland responded to CNN's repeated requests for comment on March 22, denying allegations of wrongdoing by Eritrean soldiers and denying that Eritrean troops were in Ethiopia.
For months, both countries denied that Eritrean troops were in the war-torn region, and insisted no civilians have been killed in the conflict, contradicting accounts from residents, refugees, aid agencies, diplomats and Ethiopian civilian officials.
If the soldiers in the Mahibere D**o video are indeed Ethiopian National Defense Forces then it may be the first visual evidence of Ethiopia's involvement in war crimes.
The Ethiopian government and its interim administration in Tigray did not immediately respond to CNN's request for comment on the video and accusations that its forces abducted scores of men from the Mahibere D**o area.
On Friday, after CNN's investigation published, Abiy's office said in a statement that "social media posts and claims cannot be taken as evidence, regardless of whether Western media report it or not." The statement added that the government "has indicated its open will for independent investigations to be undertaken in the Tigray region."
• Amnesty International interviewed 41 survivors and witnesses to mass killings in November
• Troops carried out extrajudicial executions, indiscriminate shelling and widespread looting
• Satellite imagery analysis shows evidence consistent with new burial sites
Eritrean troops fighting in Ethiopia’s Tigray state systematically killed hundreds of unarmed civilians in the northern city of Axum on 28-29 November 2020, opening fire in the streets and conducting house-to-house raids in a massacre that may amount to a crime against humanity, Amnesty International said today in a new report.
Amnesty International spoke to 41 survivors and witnesses – including in-person interviews with recently arrived refugees in eastern Sudan and phone interviews with people in Axum – as well as 20 others with knowledge of the events. They consistently described extrajudicial executions, indiscriminate shelling and widespread looting after Ethiopian and Eritrean troops led an offensive to take control of the city amid the conflict with the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) in mid-November.
Satellite imagery analysis by the organization’s Crisis Evidence Lab corroborates reports of indiscriminate shelling and mass looting, as well as identifies signs of new mass burials near two of the city’s churches.
“The evidence is compelling and points to a chilling conclusion. Ethiopian and Eritrean troops carried out multiple war crimes in their offensive to take control of Axum. Above and beyond that, Eritrean troops went on a rampage and systematically killed hundreds of civilians in cold blood, which appears to constitute crimes against humanity,” said Deprose Muchena, Amnesty International's Director for East and Southern Africa.
This atrocity ranks among the worst documented so far in this conflict. Besides the soaring death toll, Axum’s residents were plunged into days of collective trauma amid violence, mourning and mass burials.
Deprose Muchena, Amnesty International's Director for East and Southern Africa
“This atrocity ranks among the worst documented so far in this conflict. Besides the soaring death toll, Axum’s residents were plunged into days of collective trauma amid violence, mourning and mass burials.”
The mass killings came just before the annual celebration at Axum Tsion Mariam, a major Ethiopian Orthodox Christian festival on 30 November, compounding the trauma by casting a pall over an annual event that typically draws many pilgrims and tourists to the sacred city.
On 19 November 2020, Ethiopian and Eritrean military forces took control of Axum in a large-scale offensive, killing and displacing civilians with indiscriminate shelling and shooting.
In the nine days that followed, the Eritrean military engaged in widespread looting of civilian property and extrajudicial executions.
Witnesses could easily identify the Eritrean forces. They drove vehicles with Eritrean license plates, wore distinctive camouflage and footwear used by the Eritrean army and spoke Arabic or a dialect of Tigrinya not spoken in Ethiopia. Some bore the ritual facial scars of the Ben Amir, an ethnic group absent from Ethiopia. Finally, some of the soldiers made no secret of their identity; they openly told residents they were Eritrean.
‘All we could see were dead bodies and people crying’
According to witnesses, the Eritrean troops unleashed the worst of the violence on 28-29 November. The onslaught came directly after a small band of pro-TPLF militiamen attacked the soldiers’ base on Mai Koho mountain on the morning of 28 November. The militiamen were armed with rifles and supported by residents brandishing improvised weapons, including sticks, knives and stones.
Sustained gunfire can be heard ringing out across the city in a video recorded early that day from several locations at the bottom of the mountain.
A 22-year-old man who wanted to bring food to the militia told Amnesty International: “The Eritrean soldiers were trained but the young residents didn’t even know how to shoot… a lot of the [local] fighters started running away and dropped their weapons. The Eritrean soldiers came into the city and started killing randomly.”
Survivors and witnesses said Eritrean forces deliberately and wantonly shot at civilians from about 4pm onwards on 28 November.
According to residents, the victims carried no weapons and many were running away from the soldiers when they were shot. One man who hid in an unfinished building said he saw a group of six Eritrean soldiers kill a neighbour with a vehicle-mounted heavy machine-gun on the street near the Mana Hotel: “He was standing. I think he was confused. They were probably around 10 metres from him. They shot him in the head.”
I saw a lot of people dead on the street. Even my uncle’s family. Six of his family members were killed. So many people were killed.
21-year-old male resident of Axum
A 21-year-old male resident said: “I saw a lot of people dead on the street. Even my uncle’s family. Six of his family members were killed. So many people were killed.”
The killings left Axum’s streets and cobblestone plazas strewn with bodies. One man who had run out of the city returned at night after the shooting stopped. “All we could see on the streets were dead bodies and people crying,” he said.
On 29 November, Eritrean soldiers shot at anyone who tried to move the bodies of those killed.
The soldiers also continued to carry out house-to-house raids, hunting down and killing adult men, as well as some teenage boys and a smaller number of women. One man said he watched through his window and saw six men killed in the street outside his house on 29 November. He said the soldiers lined them up and shot from behind, using a light-machine gun to kill several at a time with a single bullet.
Interviewees named scores of people they knew who were killed, and Amnesty International has collected the names of more than 240 of the victims. The organization has been unable to independently verify the overall death toll, but consistent witness testimonies and corroborating evidence make it plausible that hundreds of residents were killed.
Burying the dead
Most of the burials took place on 30 November, but the process of collecting and burying the bodies lasted several days.
Many residents said they volunteered to move the bodies on carts, in batches of five to 10 at a time; one said he transported 45 bodies. Residents estimate that several hundred people were buried in the aftermath of the massacre, and they attended funerals at several churches where scores were buried. Hundreds were buried at the largest funeral, held at the complex that includes the Arba’etu Ensessa church and the Axum Tsion St Mariam Church.
Amnesty International’s Crisis Evidence Lab geolocated a video showing people carrying a dead man on a stretcher in Da’Ero Ela Plaza (14.129918, 38.717113), towards Arba’etu Ensessa church. High-resolution satellite imagery from 13 December shows disturbed earth consistent with recent graves around the Arba’etu Ensessa and the Abune Aregawi churches.
Intimidation and looting
In the days following the burials, the Eritrean army rounded up hundreds of residents in different parts of the city. They beat some of the men, threatening them with a new round of revenge killings if they resisted.
Axum residents witnessed a surge in the Eritrean army’s looting during this period, targeting stores, public buildings including a hospital, and private homes. Luxury goods and vehicles were widely looted, as well as medication, furniture, household items, food, and drink.
International humanitarian law (the laws of war) prohibits deliberate targeting of civilians, indiscriminate attacks, and pillage (looting). Violations of these rules constitute war crimes. Unlawful killings that form part of a widespread or systematic attack against a civilian population are crimes against humanity.
“As a matter of urgency, there must be a UN-led investigation into the grave violations in Axum. Those suspected of responsibility for war crimes or crimes against humanity must be prosecuted in fair trials and victims and their families must receive full reparation,” said Deprose Muchena.“We repeat our call on the Ethiopian government to grant full and unimpeded access across Tigray for humanitarian, human rights, and media organizations
Sisay Demissie Chukala
CEIA Director
Evidence suggests Ethiopian military carried out massacre in Tigraya massacre in northern Ethiopia was carried out by members of the Ethiopian military. It a...