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Three senior police officers in Amhara, a regional State in Ethiopia beset by recent unrest, have been killed in the last two days by unknown assailants, local authorities have announced.
“The police chief of Dejen Woreda (district), Zewudu Tadele, and the head of the Crime Prevention Service, Worku Shimeles, were killed in Kurar district by an unidentified armed group,” the district’s communications department said in a post on Facebook. “A driver on a mission with them was injured,” the text said. Kurar district is located around 200 km from Addis Ababa.
In addition, the chief of police for the town of Shewa Robit, “Abdu Hussein, was killed by unknown assailants”, the mayor’s office said on Facebook on Tuesday evening, without giving further details. A night-time curfew has been decreed in the locality as of Wednesday 6:00 pm “for an indefinite period”, add the authorities of Shewa Robit, located some 200 km by road northeast of Addis Ababa. “All movement of people and vehicles is prohibited”, it added.
No one has yet claimed responsibility for the murders. The Amhara region in northern Ethiopia has been experiencing unrest since an attempt in mid-April by the Ethiopian federal authorities to dismantle its “special forces”, paramilitary units created outside any legal framework by many regional states over the past fifteen years.
Amhara nationalists claim that the federal government wants to disarm only the Amhara “special forces” in order to weaken the region, which is involved in territorial disputes with the neighboring regions of Tigray and Oromia.
