Gunmen kill over 100 in Ethiopia’s Benishangul-Gumuz region

Gunmen killed more than 100 people in a dawn attack in the western Benishangul-Gumuz region of Ethiopia on Wednesday, the human rights commission said, as residents described fleeing the latest deadly assault in an area bedevilled by ethnic violence.

The attack occurred in the village of Bekoji in Bulen county in the Metekel zone, an area where multiple ethnic groups live, the state-run Ethiopian Human Rights Commission said in a statement.

Ethiopia, Africa’s second-most populous nation, has been grappling with regular outbreaks of deadly violence since Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed was appointed in 2018 and accelerated democratic reforms that loosened the state’s iron grip on regional rivalries.

Elections due next year have further inflamed simmering tensions over land, power and resources.

In a separate part of the country, Ethiopia’s military has been fighting rebels in the northern Tigray region for over six weeks in a conflict that has displaced close to 950,000 people. The deployment of federal troops there has raised fears of a security vacuum in other restive regions.

Ethiopia is also fighting an insurgency in the Oromiya region and faces long-running security threats from Somali Islamist militants along its porous eastern border.

Olajumoke Adeleke