ADDIS ABABA, Nov. 24 (Xinhua) -- At least 600 people have been killed in a massacre in northern Ethiopia, the governmental Ethiopia Human Rights Commission (EHRC) said on Tuesday.
In a press statement, EHRC, said at least 600 people, most of whom are ethnic Amharas were killed in Maikadra town on November 10 by ethnic Tigrayan youth group called "Samri" aided and abetted by local security forces.
EHRC said it was able to verify the massacre had occurred after deploying a team of human rights experts to Maikadra, in Tigray Region's Western Zone, for a rapid investigation into purported mass killings of civilians and related human rights violations.
Since Nov. 4, the Ethiopian government had been undertaking military operations against the TPLF, the ruling party in Ethiopia's northernmost Tigray region, and now in an official war against the federal government that followed TPLF's reported attack against the Northern command of the Ethiopian Defense Force, a division that has been stationed in the region for over two decades.
The Ethiopian government has been blaming the TPLF, which was one of the four coalition fronts of Ethiopia's former ruling party the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), for masterminding various treasonous acts across different parts of the country with an overarching goal of destabilizing the East African country.
Three of the former four EPRDF coalition members had last year joined other regional parties in establishing the Prosperity Party, as the TPLF refused to join.
The mounting differences between the federal government and TPLF exacerbated in September this year, when the Tigray regional government decided to go with its planned regional elections, which the Ethiopian parliament had previously postponed due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Enditem
