UPDATE – Rebels kill some 30 people in southwestern Ethiopia

Oct 31, 2005 (ADDIS ABABA) — Rebels launched a string of raids in the southwestern corner of Ethiopia, killing some 30 people, including a state police chief and four civilians, diplomats said Monday.

The pro-government media said four police officers were killed and at least six officers were wounded during Sunday’s pre-dawn attacks on a police station, a prison and a Roman Catholic church compound in Gambella, an underdeveloped, swampy, malaria-infested lowland region of this Horn of Africa nation.

The dead include members of a local militia and police officers. Rebels freed colleagues in a police jail, but were unable to release those in the main prison in Gambella’s main town. It was unclear how many people were being held in those jails, Western diplomats said.

Ethiopian security forces were fighting the rebels Monday afternoon in Lare, a town near the border with Sudan, the diplomats said.

“Members of the defense forces and the Federal Police are in hot pursuit of the culprits,” Senday Gach, a police official, told the pro-government Walta Information Center.

Rebels from the semi-nomadic Anuak community have been fighting Ethiopian police and army troops in Gambella, accusing the security forces of human rights abuses. In March, the New York-based Human Rights Watch said Ethiopian troops have committed widespread killings, rapes and torture of the Anuak population in Gambella since late 2003.

Numerous attacks by soldiers and civilians from other ethnic groups have killed more than 500 people and driven several thousand Anuaks from their homes in the region, said Human Rights Watch investigator Chris Albin-Lackey.

In December 2003, civilians attacked several Anuak villages, killing more than 400 people, Albin-Lackey said. Ethiopian soldiers responded to the massacre by attacking more Anuak villages, Albin-Lackey said.

(AP/ST)