Three employees of the non-governmental organization Doctors Without Borders (Médecins sans Frontières, MSF), a Spaniard and two Ethiopians, were killed in an attack in the Ethiopian province of Tigray, the NGO’s arm in Spain announced on Friday.
In recent days, Tigray has been transformed into a hotbed of war. An air strike on a market on Tuesday killed 64 people.
“We also lost contact with the car they were traveling in yesterday afternoon and this morning the vehicle was found empty and their bodies a few meters away,” MSF said in a statement, condemning the “barbaric murder” of workers. of.
Maria Hernandez, a 35-year-old Spaniard, coordinated the organization’s efforts to help deal with the crisis in Tigray. Johannes Khalefom Renta and Tentros Gebremariam Gebremichael, 31, both Ethiopian citizens, were the NGO’s assistant coordinator and guide, respectively. “Maria, Johannes and Tentros were there to help the population and it is inconceivable that they paid with their lives for it,” Doctors Without Borders said in a statement.
When contacted by Agence France-Presse, the NGO declined to give further details about the circumstances of the deaths.
Rames Rajasingham, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, described the killings of the three workers as “scandalous and heartbreaking”. “Authorities must now conduct a swift investigation into their killings, which are ‘blatant violations of international humanitarian law,'” he said in a press release issued in New York.
For its part, US diplomacy called for an independent inquiry into the killings, and stressed that the Ethiopian government “ultimately bears full responsibility for ensuring the safety of workers in humanitarian organizations.”
In Brussels, European Union Foreign Minister Joseph Borrell “strongly condemned” this “horror”, which is “a new creepy example of the escalation of the conflict in Tigray and a blatant violation of international humanitarian law”.
The Ethiopian Foreign Ministry confirmed last night via Twitter that the three NGO workers had been killed in the community of Abi Andi, about fifty kilometers from the capital Mecca.
He added that the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), ousted from power in the province by the federal army in a large-scale operation launched last November, was “active” in the area.
