Around 50 bodies found floating in a river between Ethiopia and Sudan

According to a Sudanese official quoted by AP, local authorities in Kassala province They found around 50 bodies, apparently people fleeing war in Ethiopia’s neighboring Tigray region, floating in the river between countries over the past week, some with gunshot wounds or their hands tied.

The official said a forensic investigation is needed to determine the causes of death. The source spoke on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to report to the media.

Two Ethiopian health workers from the Sudanese border community of Hamdayet confirmed seeing the bodies found in the Setit River, known in Ethiopia as Tekeze. The river runs through some of the most dangerous areas of the nine-month conflict in Tigray, where the Tigrayans accused Ethiopian and allied forces of committing atrocities while fighting Tigray forces.

Tewodros Tefera, a surgeon who fled the nearby Tigray town of Humera to Sudan, told The Associated Press that two of the bodies were found on Monday, one of a man with his hands tied and the other of a woman with a chest wound. Other refugees buried at least 10 other bodies.

Tefera also shared a video of men appearing to prepare a shroud for a body floating face down in the river.

The surgeon claimed the bodies were found downstream from Humera, where authorities and Allied fighters in Ethiopia’s Amhara region have been accused by refugees of expelling local Tigrayans during the war while claiming that the Western Tigray was their land.

“In fact, we are dealing with the bodies detected by the fishermen”Tewodros said. “I suspect there are more bodies in the river.”

While the bodies were difficult to identify, one of them had a common name in the Tigrayan language, Tigrinya, tattooed on the arm, the surgeon said.

Another doctor working in Hamdayet who saw the bodies told the AP that some of the bodies had facial marks indicating that they were of the Tigraya ethnicity.

“I saw a lot of barbaric things”, said the doctor, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to reporters. “Some had been hit by an ax.”

Witnesses in the river told him that they were unable to catch all the floaters downstream due to the rapid flow of water during the rainy season.

A Twitter account created by the Ethiopian government on Monday He called the corps accounts a bogus campaign “propagandist” among Tigray forces.

Samantha Power, administrator of the US Agency for International Development, on Monday visited a refugee camp in Sudan that is home to thousands of Ethiopians who fled the Tigray War. He will then travel to Ethiopia to pressure the government to authorize humanitarian aid in Tigray, a region of around 6 million people experiencing the world’s worst food crisis in a decade. The United States says up to 900,000 people are now facing conditions of starvation.

The United Nations food agency said it was working to deliver food to Tigray via Sudan despite frayed links between Khartoum and Addis Ababa.

Negotiations to gain access to the stranded Tigray region have proven to be quite difficult, said Marianne Ward, deputy country director of the World Food Program in Sudan. He said WFP had already shipped 50,000 tonnes of wheat to Ethiopia via Sudan.

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