More than freaking 100 folks got killed in a drone strike close to a school in the East Gojjam Zone of the Amhara region on Thursday, 17 April, according to some people who saw it happen.
In the small town of Gedeb, regular folks who were fixing fences and putting up classrooms at a primary school got hit in a drone strike. Witnesses talked about how everyone was freaking out and didn’t have a clue what was going on.
One witness said that when he and his buddies went to check out the attack site, “no one looked like themselves anymore.” “Everything was just burnt to a crisp. A few folks were still alive, screaming and some were on the ground. It’s messed up to think about how cruel people can be,” he said.
Another local, who got hurt in the arm while fixing the school fence, talked about a ‘big boom’ and said that ‘lots of people got hurt.’ “Some were cutting trees, others were nailing things, and some were working on the poles.”
Another witness said most of the victims died right away, with a bunch of them being young folks. People around town and sources at the hospital are saying that hundreds of people got killed.
Mulu Gete, who’s in charge of the area, said that civilians didn’t die in the attack and called the whole thing “a lie to make us look bad.” He said they were going after ‘extremist’ Fano fighters.
“We got a bunch of armed groups here. They’re always training for something. Saying they were just fixing a school—what a joke… No regular folks died, not even from random bullets,” he said.
But, one person who saw everything go down said the victims were just regular folks, not fighters. He knew a lot of them from doing business with them.
“If they were Fano, we would have seen weapons on them when we found their bodies. We know how to tell the difference between civilians and armed fighters,” the guy said.
The Ethiopian Human Rights Commission mentioned they’re keeping an eye on the attack that was reported.