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ADDIS ABABA – Gunmen killed 32 people and burned more than 20 houses in a raid in an area of western Ethiopia, a regional administrator said Monday.
The killings were perpetrated on Sunday by an armed group called OLF Shane in the western Wollega area of the Oromiya region, administrator Elias Umeta told Reuters.
“Today we buried 32 of them. Between 700 and 750 people were also displaced from the area,” he said.
OLF Shane split from the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), an opposition party that spent years in exile but was allowed to return to Ethiopia after Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed took office in 2018. Sporadic violence has rocked to Ethiopia since then.
OLF Shane says he is fighting for the rights of the Oromos, Ethiopia’s largest ethnic group. But an immediate motive for the killings was not known, Elias said.
“They were executed after the armed group told them that they wanted to meet with them,” he said.
Ethiopia’s state-run Human Rights Commission said the attack had targeted people from the Amharic ethnic group.
“They were taken from their homes and taken to a school, where they were killed,” Daniel Bekele, the commission’s chief commissioner, said in a statement, adding that the death toll could be higher.
“These gruesome killings of civilians are unthinkable and violate basic principles of humanity.”
The latest killings add to recent incidents of violence in various parts of Ethiopia.
Clashes last week between two Ethiopian states, Somali and Afar, which have long disputed their border, killed at least 27 people.
In mid-October, at least 12 people died in the Metakal area of the Benishangul-Gumuz region. That followed two attacks in the same area in September, when 45 people died.
