About 30 people died last week in an attack carried out against a church in the town of Debos Kebele, located in the Oromia region, as reported by the newspaper ‘Addis Standard’, which cites residents of the place.

One of the residents of the town has indicated that the attackers, supposedly members of the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA), broke into the church during the celebrations for the beginning of two months of fasting by members of an Orthodox branch.

Thus, these sources have indicated that among the victims are 21 women who were kidnapped and executed in a nearby forest. This resident, identified as Hussein, has stated that he was part of the party that went to the area to recover the bodies.

Witnesses quoted by the media have detailed that a total of 29 people died, including the church leader and 28 people executed in the Gerji forest. Relatives have highlighted that the security forces had left the place to launch an operation in the area against the OLA.

The attack has also caused the flight of part of the population for fear of new attacks, since the rebels continue in the surroundings. At the moment, neither the regional authorities nor the central government have ruled on what happened.

During the day, eight people died in an attack carried out on Monday by the OLA, the military wing of the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), in the town of Amaro, in Oromia, during a meeting to discuss reconciliation, according to the Ethiopian news portal Borkena.

However, a faction of the OLF headed by its vice president, Ararso Bikila, has rejected the announcement and has said that it will participate in the elections. “Much of the problem is internal, not external,” said a spokesman for this faction in statements to the British television channel BBC.

The OLF itself announced on Monday its decision not to participate in the next legislative elections in Ethiopia, thus adding to the boycott announced last week by the Oromo Federalist Congress (OFC), amid political tensions in the African country.

The leader of the OLF – an organization considered a terrorist until 2018 -, Dawud Isa, returned from exile in September 2018 along with several other leaders in the framework of the reconciliation process opened after the coming to power of Abiy Ahmed in April of that year.

The OLF was fighting for decades for the secession of the Oromia region, but last August it announced that it was giving up the armed struggle, accepting the prime minister’s offer of amnesty. The Oromos are the majority ethnic group in Ethiopia but have traditionally been marginalized from power.

This situation sparked violent protests in the years leading up to 2018 that left hundreds of deaths and were ultimately one of the reasons for Hailemariam Desalegn’s resignation in February 2018. Abiy is the country’s first Oromo head of government.

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