Seven prisoners die in attempted jailbreak in Ethiopia

Nov 3, 2005 (ADDIS ABABA) — Seven prisoners were killed Thursday and 23 others injured in an attempted jailbreak on the outskirts of Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, the state-run television reported.

No other details were available on the incident that occurred at the Kaliti prison, mainly used to detain officials from the regime of former dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam.

While no one knows how many people Mengistu’s Marxist regime killed during the 1970s nationwide purge of students, intellectuals and politicians, some experts estimate 150,000 suspected government opponents were killed.

Human Rights Watch described the so-called Red Terror as “one of the most systematic uses of mass murder by a state ever witnessed in Africa.”

Ethiopia’s notoriously inefficient courts have convicted 1,017 people since 1994 for participating in the Red Terror, but 6,426 await trial. More than 3,000 of them, like Mengistu, live in exile.

(AP/ST)