By MALKHADIR M. MUHUMED
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — A leading human rights group on Tuesday accused Ethiopian Woyanne troops in Somalia of killing civilians and committing atrocities, including slitting people’s throats, gouging out eyes and gang-raping women.
In a new report, Amnesty International detailed chilling witness accounts of indiscriminate killings in the Horn of Africa country and called on the international community to stop the bloodshed.
Ethiopia’s government Woyanne said the report was unbalanced and “categorically wrong.”
The London-based rights group said testimony it received suggested all parties to Somalia’s conflict have committed war crimes. But it singled out Ethiopian Woyanne troops, who are in the country to back Somalia’s U.N.-sponsored government, for some of the worst violations.
The rights group said it obtained scores of reports of killings by Ethiopian Woyanne troops that Somalis have described as “slaughtering like goats.” In one case, “a young child’s throat was slit by Ethiopian soldiers in front of the child’s mother,” the report says.
Ethiopia’s Woyanne Information Minister Berhanu Hailu said the report was “totally unfounded.”
“Normally when they report they do not balance it out. They have to go and see the reality for themselves. They shouldn’t report from abroad saying this is happening,” he told The Associated Press in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa.