UN cancels Tigray flights after Ethiopia government airstrike kills 11 civilians
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia - Ethiopia’s latest aerial bombardment of Tigray’s capital city on Friday injured 11 civilians and forced a UN flight bound for the famine-threatened region to turn around, humanitarian sources and doctors told AFP on Friday.
The incident prompted the UN to suspend its twice-weekly passenger flights to Tigray for humanitarian personnel, UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said at a press conference.
The strike, the fifth on the city since Monday according to the government, coincided with ramped-up fighting farther south in Amhara region as Ethiopia’s nearly year-long war rumbles on.
A spokeswoman for Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, Billene Seyoum, told AFP the air force was targeting a training centre used by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) rebel group that was ‘also serving as a battle network hub by the terrorist organisation’.
Residents told AFP the strike hit a field, with one reporting it set alight dry grass collected for livestock.
One civilian injured in an earlier strike who was being treated at Tigray’s flagship Ayder Referral Hospital succumbed to their injuries on Friday, said research director Dr Hayelom Kebede.
Abiy’s government has been locked in a war against the TPLF since last November, though Tigray itself has seen little combat since late June, when the rebels seized control of much of Ethiopia’s northernmost region and the military largely withdrew.
On Monday Ethiopia’s air force launched two strikes in Tigray’s capital Mekele that the UN said killed three children and wounded several other people.
And on Wednesday it bombed TPLF weapons caches in Mekele and the town of Agbe, about 80km to the west.
A hospital official told AFP that Wednesday’s strike in Mekele injured at least eight people, including a pregnant woman.
A fourth strike in Mekele on Thursday did not result in any casualties, according to medics and the TPLF.
The UN flight that was forced back because of Friday’s strike was carrying 11 humanitarian staff, said Gemma Connell, head of the UN’s humanitarian coordination office for East Africa. “The flight was forced to turn back in midair, because of the events on the ground,” Connell said.