Armed members of the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) killed at least 29 people after storming a church in East Welega, located in the Oromia region of central Ethiopia, last week, the Addis Standard reported on Tuesday.
The attack took place on March 5 while local members of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahdo Church were celebrating the start of a two-month fasting season, residents of Jarte Wereda village told the newspaper.
OLA members stormed the village’s church and instantly killed its leader before marching at least 28 other church members to a local forest where they were executed.
“Of the victims, 21 were women, including those carrying babies,” a local named Hussein told the Addis Standard.
The bodies of three of the women were found with their babies lying beside them, according to Hussein, who was assigned by the village to recover the victims’ bodies from nearby Gerji forest on March 6.
“One among the women was released according to eyewitnesses, and she is quoted as saying she escaped rape by telling her abductors that she was HIV/AIDS positive,” the newspaper reported, citing local resident accounts.
Other witnesses confirmed the March 5 attack to Ethiopia’s Wazema radio station.
Oromia is home to the Oromo people, who constitute roughly 35 percent of Ethiopia’s population and form the East African nation’s largest ethnic group. The Oromia Region is an official state in Ethiopia whose state capital, Addis Ababa, also serves as the national capital.
The OLA is the former armed wing of the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), a separatist party that has long opposed a central Ethiopian federal authority. OLA broke off from the OLF in 2018 after current Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed was elected to office. The militant group has carried out kidnappings and bomb attacks across western and southern Ethiopia, according to Ethiopian federal authorities.
OLA militants killed at least 50 people in an attack on the East Welega village of Gawa Qanqa on November 1, local authorities said at the time.
“Witnesses said dozens of men, women and children were killed, property looted and what the militants could not carry away, they set on fire,” Amnesty International reported.
Survivors of the attack told the human rights organization “they had counted 54 bodies in a school compound where the militants gathered people who did not manage to flee, mainly women, children and the elderly, and killed them.”
The Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (EHRC) said up to 60 “armed and unarmed assailants” targeted members of the Amhara ethnic group, Ethiopia’s second-largest ethnic group, in the attack.