According to Ethiopian authorities, this particularly cruel video was recorded at the end of February in the area where the large Ethiopian Renaissance dam is located. It is about the killing of the civilian Tigrayan by soldiers of the Federal Army and Amharamilis.
It’s a five-minute sequence, especially scary. We see a crowd of armed soldiers and civilians, others unarmed, talking Amharic and gathered around a bonfire of wood and straw. And we see bound men simply thrown into the fire, one of them apparently still alive, under the mockery and insults of the crowd.
The spread of this video, from last Friday, caused a wave of disgust, both in the diaspora and in the country. To the extent that the government itself immediately qualified the scene as a “particularly horrific and inhuman act” committed against “innocent civilians”, he said. He also located the crime scene: a village in the sensitive region of Benishangul-Gumuz, in the western part of the country, between the capital and the great Renaissance pond. Several foreign governments have also expressed their horror over this video.
The Ethiopian Human Rights Commission has provided its own details: the crime is said to have taken place on February 24, in retaliation for a fatal ambush for soldiers the day before. According to her, the cremated victims were Tigrayans who were first shot on the pretext that they were attackers. Eight in total plus one more who was not actually dead when he was thrown into the fire.
