ADDIS ABABA, Aug 27 (NNN-AGENCIES) — An air strike on a children’s play area killed at least seven people in the capital of Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region on Friday, medical officials there said, the first such attack after a four-month old ceasefire collapsed this week.
The officials said three children were among the dead but a a federal government spokesman denied any civilian casualties.
Reports of the Friday air strike on Mekele came just days after ground fighting resumed between government forces and rebels after a five-month lull, ending a truce and dashing hopes of peace talks.
Kibrom Gebreselassie, chief clinical director of Mekele’s Ayder Referral Hospital, said on Twitter the hospital had received four dead, including two children, and nine wounded.
Fasika Amdeslasie, a surgeon at Ayder Hospital, said a colleague at Mekelle Hospital told him it had received three more bodies – a mother and her child and another unidentified person – bringing the total number of dead to seven.
The bodies brought to Ayder included boy around 10, two women and a young teenager, he said.
As Tigrayan rebels accused the air force of hitting a residential area and a kindergarten, the government said it was “targeting only military sites.”
The Tigray People’s Liberation Front rebel group “has begun dumping fake body bags in civilian areas in order to claim that the air force attacked civilians,” the Government Communication Service said in a statement.
“Civilians are dead and injured” and a rescue operation was underway, Kindeya Gebrehiwot, a TPLF spokesman, said in a message after the first air strike to hit Tigray in many months.
Two humanitarian sources in Ethiopia also said they had been notified of an air strike in Mekele.
Shortly after reports of the strike emerged, the government announced it would “take action” against the TPLF and warned civilians to stay away from military targets in the northern region.
A truce in March had paused the worst of the bloodshed and allowed aid convoys to return slowly to Tigray, where the UN says millions are severely hungry, and fuel and medicine are in short supply.
But on Wednesday, the warring sides announced a return to the battlefield, with each accusing the other of firing first as fresh offensives erupted along Tigray’s southern border.
The return to combat has alarmed the international community, which has been pushing both sides to peacefully resolve the brutal 21-month war in Africa’s second most populous nation.
