Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on August 19, 2022
💭 UPDATE:
Ethiopian Airlines Removes Crew Who Fell Asleep On Air, Pending Further Investigation. Ethiopian Airlines released the following statement:
“We have received a report which indicates Ethiopian flight number ET343 en route from Khartoum to Addis Ababa temporarily lost communication with Addis Ababa Air Traffic Control on 15 August 2022. The flight later landed safely after communication was restored. The concerned Crew have been removed from operation pending further investigation. Appropriate corrective action will be taken based on the outcome of the investigation. Safety has always been and will continue to be our first priority.”
✈ Deeply concerning incident at Africa’s largest airline — Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737, ET343 was still at cruising altitude of 37,000ft by the time it reached destination Addis Ababa. Why hadn’t it started to descend for landing? Both pilots were asleep.
Two pilots on Ethiopian Airlines flight ‘FALL ASLEEP at 37,000 feet’ but manage to land the plane after autopilot sounds an alarm and wakes them up after disconnecting.
The pilots were at 37,000 ft when the incident happened
Were meant to begin their descent to Addis Ababa Bole Airport
Finally awoke when alarm went off and autopilot disconnected and landed plane
Comes after a separate incident in which two ITA pilots accused of sleeping
Air traffic controllers tried to contact the pilots numerous times without success After overflying the runway (still at cruising altitude), the autopilot disconnected – and this chime alert woke the pilots up — who then initiated a descent and eventually made a safe landing.
Two pilots of a passenger airplane fell asleep mid flight- but miraculously landed their plane without anyone suffering injuries.
Flight ET343 was travelling from Khartoum to Addis Ababa on August 15 when the incident happened at 37,000 ft.
The pilots were meant to begin their descent to Addis Ababa Bole Airport.
According to the Aviation Herald, Air Traffic Control attempted to contact the pilots but were unsuccessful.
Finally, the crew awoke, after the aircraft’s autopilot disconnected and sounded an alarm.
The pilots managed to land the plane safely and it stayed on the runway for around two-and-a-half hours before it left for its next flight.
Data confirms the incident, which shows that the aircraft had overflown the runway and managed to make another approach when the pilots awoke.
The aircraft continued past the top of descent maintaining FL370 and continued along the FMC route set up for an approach to runway 25L without descending however. ATC tried to contact the crew numerous times without success. After overflying runway 25L at FL370 the autopilot disconnected, the disconnect wailer woke the crew up who then maneuvered the aircraft for a safe landing on runway 25L about 25 minutes after overflying the runway at FL370.
The aircraft remained on the ground for about 2.5 hours before departing for its next flight.
The incident left people shocked, with many saying it was ‘unprofessional’ and ‘dangerous.’
One person wrote: ‘Hopefully both pilots got fired and the aviation authorities starting an investigation on the crew duty schedules etc of this airline! Thanks god that nothing bad happened.’
Another added: ‘this is unprofessional and dangerous’ while a third added: ‘mad.’
But not everyone agreed that the pilots should be fired, with one person arguing they could have been overworked and the company ‘covered it up.’
And a separate person was unsurprised by the incident, commenting: ‘Ex controller here, trust me when I tell you its happened here as well.’
Yohannes and Gebremeskel knew it would be freezing cold inside the bulk cargo area of the Airbus A350 plane on the long flight from Ethiopia’s capital to Belgium.
But the two ground technicians with Ethiopian Airlines, both of Tigrayan origin, said they felt a threat from the Ethiopian authorities that left them no choice but to stow away among crates of fresh flowers.
Both men said family members had been detained under sweeping emergency laws that have targeted ethnic Tigrayans — and that they feared it was their turn next. The laws were imposed in November as Ethiopian government troops battle forces from the northern Tigray region in a bitter conflict that has now dragged on for 14 months. The government denies the laws targeted any particular group and recently lifted the state of emergency.
A view of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on November 27. Witnesses and Ethiopia's human rights commission accused authorities of arresting people in the capital based on ethnicity, using the wider powers granted by the state of emergency.
A view of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on November 27. Witnesses and Ethiopia’s human rights commission accused authorities of arresting people in the capital based on ethnicity, using the wider powers granted by the state of emergency.
So, in the early hours of December 4, Yohannes and Gebremeskel, both 25, made a spur of the moment decision to climb into the storage section of a converted Ethiopian Airlines cargo plane that was sitting in one of the hangars at Addis Ababa Bole International Airport, waiting for the early morning flight to Brussels, Belgium.
As ground technicians with Ethiopia’s flagship commercial airline for the past five years, they had access to the compartment for routine inspection purposes. But if their hiding place was discovered, they would face harsh punishment, they said. CNN has changed both men’s names at their request for security reasons.
For more than three hours before take-off, they hid in the cold among the cabin crew’s luggage, not far away from the plane’s cargo shipment — crates loaded with roses ready to be delivered to Europe.
“We took the risk. We were — we had no choice, we had no choice, we couldn’t live in Addis Ababa, we were being treated as terrorists,” Yohannes, who has now obtained asylum in Belgium, told CNN in one of several phone conversations.
Four of his relatives have been killed, his fiancée is in prison in Ethiopia’s Afar region and his sister, about seven months pregnant, was seized from his house along with his furniture, he said. Yohannes believes these killings and detentions were motivated by their Tigrayan ethnicity and actioned under Ethiopia’s new emergency laws. “I don’t know where she [his fiancée] is currently,” he added. CNN has not been able to independently verify the deaths or imprisonment of Yohannes’ relatives.
“We took the risk. We were — we had no choice, we had no choice, we couldn’t live in Addis Ababa, we were being treated as terrorists.”
Yohannes
A spokeswoman for the office of Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed noted in an emailed statement to CNN that the state of emergency was lifted on January 26, 2022.
“You would note that the Council of Ministers have today decided to lift the State of Emergency. Individuals apprehended under the SOE [State of Emergency] have been released in great numbers, over the past weeks by the security sector, following investigations,” spokeswoman Billene Seyoum Woldeyes said.
“The SOE was never enacted to ‘persecute’ any group of people based on their identity,” she said.
The pair are not the only airline employees to attempt a risky escape from their home country in recent weeks. On December 1, shortly before Yohannes and Gebremeskel fled to Belgium, two other Ethiopian Airlines technicians concealed themselves in a passenger aircraft destined for Washington, DC, a spokesperson for the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) confirmed to CNN via an emailed statement.
Yohannes and Gebremeskel decided to flee from Addis Ababa Bole International Airport after reports that security was more lax there following the suspension of dozens of Tigrayan guards.
Yohannes and Gebremeskel decided to flee from Addis Ababa Bole International Airport after reports that security was more lax there following the suspension of dozens of Tigrayan guards.
They had concealed themselves in the ceiling space above the seating, according to a source at Ethiopian Airlines with firsthand knowledge of the internal investigation that was launched afterward.
Their journey would last more than 36 hours in total, as the plane flew from Addis Ababa via Lagos, Nigeria, and Dublin, Ireland, before finally landing at Dulles International Airport in Washington, DC.
Upon arrival in the US, the individuals were detained by the US Department of Homeland Security before later being transferred to US Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
CNN has also spoken to several other Tigrayan employees of Ethiopian Airlines who have fled Ethiopia in recent months through their jobs as flight crew. They told similar stories of widespread detentions of Tigrayans in Ethiopia and of targeted ethnic harassment from within the airline.
Concealed above plane crew’s bunk
CNN has been unable to speak directly to the stowaways who reached Washington, DC, but the source at Ethiopian Airlines said that both men were also of Tigrayan origin.
A CBP spokesperson said in a statement to CNN that after an identification and security examination, officers discovered the two “possessed Ethiopian Airlines employee identification cards, and that they stowed away with the intent of claiming asylum in the United States.”
“The two Ethiopian males are presently housed at a federal detention facility pending a hearing before an immigration judge,” the statement added. “CBP issued a civil penalty to Ethiopian Airlines for the security breach and were briefed on measures the airline is undertaking to enhance the airline’s aircraft security plan.”
CNN has obtained photos of the inside of the Boeing 777 aircraft as it looked during an inspection in the aftermath of the escape. In some pictures, it is possible to see the crew bunk in the center of the plane’s seating area, which the two men reportedly entered before lifting a mattress to reveal a maintenance access panel.
The images indicate they then cut a larger hole in the panel to enable them to smuggle themselves through the gap into the plane’s ceiling. They hid in this spot, not far above the aircraft’s toilets, for over a day and a half. CNN showed Boeing the photographs and a Boeing representative deferred to Ethiopian Airlines for comment.
The source at the airline told CNN they believed the fact that the stowaways were former maintenance technicians for the airline enabled them to know exactly where to hide inside the plane to go undetected without damaging the structure of the aircraft.
That they had the necessary tools with them to cut through the panelling might suggest the pair had planned the attempt in advance, the source at the airline added.
In total, 16 Ethiopian Airlines technicians appeared to have escaped via any possible means, either by boarding as cabin crew and walking off or stowing away, he said. CNN has been unable to independently verify this number.
For Yohannes and Gebremeskel, the decision to flee was an impromptu one, they said. They picked the first scheduled flight to a European country that was available and had to leave possessions including their cell phones behind in their lockers.
For the whole of their seven-hour flight to Brussels, they sat in the cargo area of the Airbus A350 with no food, no water, in the freezing cold, unbeknownst to the other members of the crew on board.
“I didn’t even have any clothes with me, I was wearing the uniform for maintenance […] I’m still wearing it,” Yohannes said.
“We don’t have anything to change into here, no underwear, no shoes, even the shoes […] we tried to cover our feet and the legs with what we had, it was night shift, on night shift we have the jacket of Ethiopian Airlines crew,” Gebremeskel, who also obtained asylum in Belgium, told CNN.
It was not how Gebremeskel imagined he would experience his first trip out of Ethiopia. Despite working for five years at Ethiopian Airlines, he had never boarded an international flight.
Airline employees claim discrimination against Tigrayans
Many people have left Ethiopia by land since the conflict began in November 2020. As of mid-December 2021, more than 50,000 people had fled into neighboring Sudan, according to UN figures. At the peak of the influx, “more than 1,000 people on average were arriving each day, overwhelming the capacity to provide aid,” a UN report said.
A refugee camp in Um Rakuba, Sudan, pictured in August. More than 50,000 Ethiopians have fled to Sudan since the Tigray conflict began in late 2020, according to the UN.
A refugee camp in Um Rakuba, Sudan, pictured in August. More than 50,000 Ethiopians have fled to Sudan since the Tigray conflict began in late 2020, according to the UN.
Meanwhile, attempts to leave Ethiopia by air by legal means have become increasingly difficult for Tigrayans, according to Ethiopian Airlines employees CNN spoke with.
Several attempted to leave by boarding planes from Addis Ababa’s Bole Airport as legitimate passengers but were denied access due to their Tigrayan ethnicity, they claimed. One former employee told CNN there were four checkpoints at the airport where passengers had their passports checked before departure.
“They check place of birth and name,” they told CNN, recalling three of their own failed attempts to leave. If the person was born in Tigray or had a Tigrayan name they were denied exit from Ethiopia, the former employee said.
As a result, several employees told CNN they escaped by working on board international flights as flight crew and fleeing when the aircraft landed abroad, often when the destination was in Europe or the US.
CNN has obtained IDs that confirm the identities of all four men who stowed away. Flight paths of the two flights — the one to Brussels and the one from Addis to Dulles airport through Dublin — have also been crosschecked on FlightRadar24.
Ethiopian Airlines has not responded to CNN’s request for comment regarding the stowaways’ journeys or the allegations of discrimination against Tigrayans.
This is not the first time Ethiopian Airlines has made headlines during the conflict in Ethiopia. In October last year CNN revealed that the airline had been ferrying weapons between Ethiopia and Eritrea at the outset of the conflict in November 2020, an act that was condemned by the international community as a potential violation of aviation law.
CNN’s investigation triggered calls by US lawmakers for sanctions and investigations into Ethiopia’s eligibility for a lucrative US trade program. Ethiopia was kicked out of the program over human rights violations at the start of 2022.
The airline has issued multiple denials about transporting weapons.
‘We were shaking’
After the aircraft carrying Yohannes and Gebremeskel landed in Brussels, the two waited for their chance to reach the terminal building.
“There were two guys working on the aircraft. One was unloading the cargo shipment and the other was coming with a torch around the plane,” Yohannes said. “So when the first was unloading the flowers we jumped to the ground — me and my friend — we jumped, and we ran to the terminal.”
Inside, employees gave them water and something to eat, but Yohannes and Gebremeskel were still in shock. “We were afraid they were going to send us back […] The guards, they brought us tea, but we were kneeling down on the ground, we were shaking,” Yohannes added.
Slowly, they felt a sense of relief, perhaps for the first time since they took off from Addis Ababa.
Their decision to flee had been prompted in part by reports that 38 Tigrayan security guards had been recently suspended at Bole Airport, meaning security was more lax than usual, they said.
“We were afraid of course … Luckily, we were not found. If we had been found, the punishment would have been harsh.”
Gebremeskel
But NISS, Ethiopia’s national intelligence security service, was still searching every part of the aircraft before departure, Gebremeskel explained, in order to prevent escapes. The Ethiopian Prime Minister’s spokesperson, Billene Seyoum, did not comment on these allegations.
Ethiopian Airlines has not responded to CNN’s request for comment on the security situation at Bole Airport
“We had some tools with us, we were afraid they were going to catch us because they check — the guy from the national intelligence security service checks every flight before departure,” Gebremeskel said.
“We were afraid of course. We were sitting with some tools with us. Maybe they will come to check that we’re working on it. Luckily, we were not found. If we had been found, the punishment would have been harsh.”
Yohannes hopes that in Belgium, he will find a country that will “respect my demands, the right to life.”
Pieter-Jan De Block, their lawyer, confirmed in a statement to CNN that both his clients had “obtained international protection in Belgium” and that they’d been released from the center where they were staying.
For Gebremeskel, the picture is bittersweet. With his family still far away — his parents are in a refugee camp in Sudan — and no money or job in Belgium, life is not easy. Although he has accommodation now, his first two nights after being granted asylum were spent sleeping at a train station.
He told CNN he hoped one day to return to Ethiopia but that until the country is a place where “people aren’t treated differently for their ethnicity,” that hope feels very remote.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on October 6, 2021
💭 My Note: Today fascist Abiy Ahmed Ali has named a new defense minister, traitor Tigrayan Abraham Belay. It is “symbolically interesting” to see a Tigrayan appointed as defense minister. I’ve stated in the past there are very cynic and satanic motives behind the appointment of all these Tigrayan technocrats.
Preparing for The #TigrayGenocide evil Abiy Ahmed and his Luciferian overlords brought Tigrayans to occupy key positions nationally and internationally:
👉 His Holiness Abune Mathias, Patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church.
👉 Dr. Lia Tadesse Gebremedhin, Minister of Health of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia.
👉 Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. Director-General of the World Health Organization.
💥 Wow! Let’s connect the dots…this is how monster war criminal Abiy Ahmed Ali and his Luciferian babysitters are literally working hard to destroy Ethiopia, instantly, before our very eyes – with the help of the Amharas — and how they are preparing themselves to blame those Tigrayan appointees for all the evil deeds of the fascist Oromo regime in Addis Ababa.
(CNN) Ethiopia’s government has used the country’s flagship commercial airline to shuttle weapons to and from neighboring Eritrea during the civil war in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, a CNN investigation has found.
Cargo documents and manifests seen by CNN, as well as eyewitness accounts and photographic evidence, confirm that arms were transported between Addis Ababa’s international airport and airports in the Eritrean cities of Asmara and Massawa on board multiple Ethiopian Airlines planes in November 2020 during the first few weeks of the Tigray conflict.
It’s the first time this weapons trade between the former foes has been documented during the war. Experts said the flights would constitute a violation of international aviation law, which forbids the smuggling of arms for military use on civil aircraft.
Atrocities committed during the conflict also appear to violate the terms of a trade program that provides lucrative access to the United States market and which Ethiopian Airlines has benefited greatly from.
Ethiopian Airlines is a state-owned economic powerhouse that generates billions of dollars a year carrying passengers to hubs across the African continent and all over the world, and it is also a member of the Star Alliance, a group of some of the world’s top aviation companies.
The airline previously issued two denials about transporting weapons.
Responding to CNN’s latest investigation, Ethiopian Airlines said it “strictly complies with all National, regional and International aviation related regulations” and that “to the best of its knowledge and its records, it has not transported any war armament in any of its routes by any of its Aircraft.”
The governments of Ethiopia and Eritrea did not respond to CNN’s requests for comment.
Military refills
Long-simmering tensions between Ethiopia’s government and the ruling party in the Tigray region exploded on November 4, when Ethiopia accused the Tigray People’s Liberation Front of attacking a federal army base.
Abiy Ahmed, Ethiopia’s Nobel Peace Prize-winning prime minister, ordered a military offensive to oust the TPLF from power. Government forces and regional militias poured into Tigray, joined on the front lines by troops from Eritrea.
Thousands of people are estimated to have died in the conflict, which by many accounts bears the hallmarks of genocide and ethnic cleansing. While all sides have been accused of committing grave human rights abuses during Tigray’s war, previous CNN investigations established that Eritrean soldiers have been behind some of the worst atrocities, including sexual violence and mass killings. Eritrea has denied wrongdoing by its soldiers and only admitted to having troops in Tigray this spring.
Documents obtained by CNN indicate that flights carrying weapons between Ethiopia and Eritrea began at least as early as a few days after the outset of the Tigray conflict.
On at least six occasions — from November 9 to November 28 — Ethiopian Airlines billed Ethiopia’s ministry of defense tens of thousands of dollars for military items including guns and ammunition to be shipped to Eritrea, records seen by CNN show.
The documents, known as air waybills, detail the contents of each shipment. In one document, the “nature and quantity of goods” is listed as “Military refill” and “Dry food stuff.” Other entries included the description “Consolidated.” The records also had abbreviations and spelling mistakes such as “AM” for ammunition and “RIFFLES” for rifles, according to airline employees. They told CNN the spelling errors were introduced when the contents were manually entered by employees into the cargo database.
Benno Baksteen, chairman of DEGAS, the Dutch Expert Group Aviation Safety, told CNN that these waybills were required for all commercial flights as the crew on board need to know the contents of the cargo to ensure they are transported safely.
On November 9, five days after Abiy ordered a military offensive in Tigray, records show an Ethiopian Airlines flight transported guns and ammunitions from Addis Ababa to Asmara, Eritrea’s capital.
An air waybill and a cargo manifest from that date show that Ethiopian Airlines charged Ethiopia $166,398.32 for about 2,643 pieces of “DFS & RIFFLE WITH AM (sic)” on that flight. DFS is a reference to “dry food stuff,” according to airline sources.
Another air waybill from a few days later, November 13, has the same shipper and consignee. The content of that shipment was “military refill and dry food stuff,” according to the document. The shipments came at a time of increased military activity; security sources in the region told CNN the Eritreans needed re-supply for the fight in Tigray.
As planes went back and forth between the two countries, massacres of Tigrayans in the city of Axum and the village of Dengelat by Eritrean troops took place on November 19 and November 30 respectively.
Cargo documents show that the series of flights between Ethiopia and Eritrea continued until at least November 28, 2020.
Some current and former Ethiopian Airlines employees, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of repercussions, said the flights continued past this date but that the majority of arms trips to Eritrea were in November.
Both cargo and passenger planes were used in the operation, though CNN has no evidence that commercial passengers were on any of the flights carrying weapons. Many of these flights do not appear on popular online flight tracking platforms such as Flightradar24. When they do, the destination in Eritrea is often not visible and the flight path vanishes once the plane crosses the border from Ethiopia.
The employees told CNN the staff could manually turn off the ADS-B signal on board to prevent the flights being publicly tracked.
The flights were often assigned the same flight numbers, primarily ET3312, ET3313 and ET3314, with ‘ET’ being the code for Ethiopian Airlines. All the planes mentioned in the cargo files seen by CNN are American-made Boeing aircraft. The airline has been in a long relationship with the US aviation giant.
A Boeing representative declined to comment.
Ethiopian Airlines workers described witnessing other airline employees loading and unloading arms and military vehicles on flights directed to Asmara. A few even claimed they helped load the weapons on the planes themselves. All spoke of being ethnically profiled for being Tigrayan.
CNN has seen the Ethiopian Airlines’ ID cards of these employees and confirmed their identities.
One former employee told CNN they were instructed at Addis Ababa’s Bole International Airport to load guns and four military vehicles onto an Ethiopian Airlines cargo plane that was due to fly to Belgium but was sent instead to Eritrea.
“The cars were Toyota pickups which have a stand for snipers,” the employee said. “I got a call from the managing director late at night informing me to handle the cargo. Soldiers came at 5 a.m. to start loading two big trucks loaded with weapons and the pickups.”
“I had to stop a flight to Brussels, a 777 cargo plane, which was loaded with flowers, then we unloaded half of the perishable goods to make space for the armaments.”
The former employee warned soldiers that the vehicles were carrying far more gas than was allowed under international air transport rules, but said they were overruled after a direct call from an army commander.
“He [the commander] said we are going to war and we need the fuel to be loaded,” the employee said. “Then I referred the issue to my manager and my manager took responsibility and allowed them to load it.”
The flight, loaded with both weapons and flowers, traveled to Eritrea, then returned to Addis before flying on to Brussels the following day, the employee said. CNN cross-referenced this testimony with Flightradar24 and found the record of an Ethiopian Airlines aircraft returning from the direction of Eritrea and flying to Brussels the next day, but could not independently verify it was the same flight referred to by the employee.
Days later, the employee said they were temporarily suspended from work. They believe they were suspended for being Tigrayan but also for the incident with the soldiers. The employee fled Ethiopia in March.
Ethiopian Airlines told CNN in its statement that no employees had been suspended or terminated due to their ethnic background.
It appears to be not the only long-distance international flight with unplanned stops. A flight from Addis Ababa to Shanghai on November 9, 2020, took a long detour via Eritrea according to the ADS-B signal that tracks the route on Flightradar24.
Several employees at the Addis Ababa airport said they saw multiple weapons flights leave for Eritrea each day at the outset of the conflict. They also spoke about flights carrying weapons from Eritrea back to Ethiopia. It’s unclear why armaments were being transferred back to Ethiopia.
One said they saw tanks and heavy artillery loaded onto planes coming to Addis Ababa, while small arms — mortars, launchers — were dispatched to Asmara. Employees told CNN they believed the smaller weaponry were being sent to Asmara to arm Eritrean troops.
All the employees said they were instructed by the airline to delete photos of the weapons from their phones. Not all of them did.
In June, photos circulated on social media platforms showing crates containing mortars on board an Ethiopian Airlines flight and the same crates being loaded on the plane in Massawa, Eritrea.
The company released a statement strongly denying the allegation that its planes were transporting weapons and claimed the photos were photoshopped.
However, CNN has corroborated the photos using visual analysis techniques, interviews and documentary evidence, dating them to a 777 Freighter cargo flight that flew from Ethiopia to Eritrea and back between November 8 and 9.
Convicted rapist who was deported from US in 2017 is arrested at Washington’s Dulles International Airport after catching Ethiopian Airlines evacuation flight out of Kabul.
Ghader Heydari, 47, boarded evacuee flight but was flagged by border officials. How he got on flight unclear because it’s ‘unlikely’ he had Special Immigrant Visa.
Man whose name matches pleaded guilty to rape in Ada County, Idaho, in 2010 A convicted rapist who was deported from the US in 2017 has been arrested at Washington’s Dulles International Airport after catching Ethiopian Airlines evacuation flight out of Kabul.
Ghader Heydari, 47, boarded a flight for evacuees but was flagged by border officials upon arrival into Washington.
He was being held at the Caroline Detention Facility in Bowling Green, Virginia, according to DailyWire, after his criminal and immigration history was pointed that.
He was released in December 2015, according to state records, and was deported from the country in 2017.
When Heydari arrived in the US on the evacuation flight, officials tried to persuade him to cancel his request to enter but he appears to have refused.
The U.S. evacuated 13,400 people from Kabul last Thursday, taking the evacuees to bases in Qatar, Bahrain or Germany before they return to the states.
They flew 5,100 people out of Kabul on US military planes. Another 8,300 were saved by coalition flights. The total – 13,400 – was drastically less than the 19,000 rescued the previous day.
Senator Ted Cruz responded to the situation on Twitter, “Biden’s evacuation from Afghanistan has been chaos. He’s bringing TENS OF THOUSANDS of people into America without thorough vetting. We have a moral obligation to get Afghans who fought with us out of harm’s way. But all unvetted evacuees should be housed in safe 3rd countries.”
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on June 27, 2021
❖ Most of the victims were women and children, said a doctor
❖ The military said the airstrike targeted Tigray fighters dressed in civilian clothes who had gathered to celebrate Martyrs’ Day
Maerg was serving customers at his cafe in Ethiopia’s Tigray village of Togoga when the military airstrike occurred, filling the room with dust and bringing down debris that struck him on the head.
“Everything was covered in black smoke, it was like a hell,” he told The Associated Press by phone, recounting one of the deadliest attacks in the Tigray conflict. “There was so much blood.”
Seven people were killed in his cafe alone, and some 30 were wounded, including his sister-in-law, who suffered burns on her face, hands and legs. Outside, he said, he saw dozens of more bodies. As time passed, he watched in horror as survivors realised that Ethiopian soldiers were blocking medical aid from arriving.
“We feel very angry because a lot of lives could have been saved,” he said.
Such witness accounts are emerging after Ethiopia’s military has said it was responsible for the airstrike that struck Togoga’s busy marketplace on Tuesday, which health officials said killed at least 64 people and injured dozens more. Many died when soldiers blocked medical teams from reaching them, or from taking them to hospitals in the regional capital, Mekele, just 60 km (37 miles) away, health workers said.
The military said the airstrike targeted Tigray fighters dressed in civilian clothes who had gathered to celebrate Martyrs’ Day. But witnesses told the AP that although fighters loyal to Tigray’s former leaders had been active in the surrounding countryside days before the airstrike, armed men were not in Togoga on the day of the attack.
Most of the victims were women and children, said a doctor who treated people at the scene.
In a war that has been largely fought in the shadows, with communications and transport links often cut since fighting in Tigray began in November, the airstrike in Togoga was a rare instance of a massacre emerging almost immediately. Within minutes, one former resident had tweeted the news. Within hours, there was international condemnation.
“Reprehensible,” the United States said, as it, the United Nations and the European Union again called for a cease-fire in Tigray, where thousands of people have been killed and hundreds of thousands now face the world’s worst famine in a decade.
Shaken survivors of the airstrike challenged the Ethiopian government’s narrative, saying only civilians had been killed.
“There were not any fighters in the marketplace, just rural people who had arrived for the market,” said Luel, a farmer who was buying clothes there when the earth shook and his leg was broken by the blast. He said he saw “around 60″ bodies on the ground. As with others interviewed, the AP is using only his first name for his safety.
Habtay, who also was shopping in the market, also said no fighters were present. He suffered a shrapnel wound to his stomach but couldn’t reach a hospital until Thursday, two days after the bombing.
“Everything was covered in dust and smoke,” he said. Helpless, he watched some survivors try to give each other first aid.
Medical care would not reach people for hours, even more than a day. Health workers told the AP they were repeatedly denied access to the Togoga by Ethiopian soldiers on the day of the attack and the following morning. One doctor, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals, said soldiers shot at his ambulance when it tried to pass a checkpoint.
Yohannes, a farmer hit in the chest by a bomb fragment, said a convoy of four ambulances attempting to evacuate him and other patients to hospitals in Mekele was blocked by soldiers and ordered back to Togoga. One patient died after returning to the village, he said.
Even after reaching Mekele, six wounded survivors of the airstrike were detained en route to a hospital, a regional health official said, on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals. Three were later released, but the others, including a teenage boy, were held at a military barracks, the official, who described the situation as “very desperate.” It was not clear why they were detained.
The airstrike occurred at a pivotal moment in Ethiopia, a day after much of the country voted in a national election that Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize winner, has promoted as part of political reforms.
But the war in Tigray, sparked in part because the national election was delayed last year amid the COVID-19 pandemic, has overshadowed the vote. The election itself has drawn criticism by the US and other observers who pointed to the detention or harassment of some opposition figures and deadly insecurity in parts of the country.
Ethiopia, with the airstrike, again finds itself on the defensive. It has disputed allegations that its troops have committed widespread human rights violations in Tigray — though the UN has said all sides in the war have committed them — and it asserts that aid has reached 5.2 million people in the region of 6 million.
The murder of three Doctors Without Borders staffers, announced by the aid group on Friday, brought a new round of condemnation of the atrocities in Tigray. It was not immediately clear who killed them.
Ethiopian Airlines B787 Dreamliner aircraft has reportedly been hit by thunder lightning in Togolese capital Lome on approach to landing.
In a dramatic twist of events, authorities in Togo have invited traditional leaders in the area to perform rituals “to cleanse the aircraft of evil spirits”.
Photos circulated on social Saturday evening show a group of people dressed in traditional attires and walking right in a grounded aircraft without vetting crew at the entrance, an indication that no normal onboarding was taking place.
Verification and fact-checking tool showed that the photos were obtained and posted on Twitter Friday by Patrick Koluyu, a humanitarian actor in the township of Edison in New Jersey, the United States.
Hilarious comments
The incident which was supposed to attract sympathy has sparked hilarious reactions from netizens who reacted particularly in the aspect of involving the so-called traditional authorities in the scene.
“Someone said, Benin, Togo, and Burkina Faso have the largest population of traditional African religious persons. In Burkina Faso they make about 60 percent of the population, then Muslims and Christians. So it’s not about the lightning conductor. It’s about prevailing beliefs,” another user wrote.
“I see it’s the evil spirits! Now we know why the Ethiopian Airlines has been transporting weapons and the forces of the fascist regimes of Ethiopia and Eritrea to commit the ongoing Tieggraii Genocide,” reads a reaction from another user.
Ethiopian Airlines flight ET871 was scheduled to operate from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to Ndola, Zambia, this morning. The flight was operated by a five year old Boeing 737-800 with the registration code ET-AQP.
It’s being reported that the plane ended up landing at the wrong airport:
The plane was supposed to land at Simon Mwansa Kapwepwe Airport, which is the international airport currently being used in Ndola. Instead the plane landed at Copperbelt International Airport, which is the new international airport in the city that’s nearing completion, but not yet open. Somehow the aircraft landed at the new airport by accident. After landing it simply taxied back to the runway, took off, and landed at the correct airport nearly on schedule.
AN Ethopian Airlines is allegedly to have landed at the new Simon Mwansa Kapwepwe Airport which is under construction in Ndola,
instead of the current one in use.
Pilot error comes as the foremost obvious reason.
AN Ethopian Airlines is allegedly to have landed at the new Simon Mwansa Kapwepwe Airport which is under construction in Ndola, instead of the current one in use. Pilot error comes as the foremost obvious reason
How could something like this happen?
As advanced as aviation is, this is far from the first time that a plane has landed at the wrong airport, and it will be far from the last time.
As of now we don’t have much information about what exactly happened, though I’m sure more details will emerge once there’s an investigation. A few things stand out:
Based on my understanding, the new airport looks a lot more like a major airport than the current one; of course that doesn’t justify landing at the wrong airport, but if they were on a visual approach, it explains what could have contributed to this
I wonder if the ATC audio from this will be released; was there a lapse in communication, or how did neither the pilots nor controllers realize the plane was landing at the new airport?
I don’t believe the airport under construction has an operational tower, so it’s pretty amazing that despite landing at the wrong airport, the plane still arrived on-time; did the pilots just make the decision to take off, or was there any dialogue with authorities at the airport?
Bottom line
While details are still limited as of now, it’s being reported that an Ethiopian Airlines 737 accidentally landed at the wrong airport in Zambia today. Instead of landing at the current international airport in the city, the plane instead landed at the new international airport under construction, about 10 miles away. The plane ended up taking off pretty quickly, and still arrived at the correct airport on-time.
I’ll be curious to see if this is investigated more closely, and if so, what the cause of this is determined to be.
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Addis Ethiopia Weblog 