Video of a man being burned alive by armed men has caused outrage in Ethiopia after it was widely shared on social media.
The six-minute clip shows a large group of men standing around a fire where several bodies already appear to be smouldering. The bound victim is then shoved onto the fire as a soldier adds grass to fuel the flames and others shout insults.
One observer is heard joking whether to eat the victim with injera, a staple flatbread. “It is better with bread,” someone replies.
The state-appointed Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (EHRC) said “government security forces” were responsible for the “extrajudicial killing” and that the victim was an ethnic Tigrayan.
The incident occurred on March 3 in the Metekel zone of the northwestern Benishangul-Gumuz region, the site of a long-running ethnic insurgency that has killed hundreds of people and displaced thousands more in the last year.
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The day before, local militants staged an attack in the area that killed 20 soldiers, including an army major. Security personnel subsequently shot dead ten civilians, including eight Tigrayans, according to the EHRC.
The rights body said the security forces then “took the bodies of the victims to a forest outside the town and began burning them”.
It added: “Eyewitnesses also told the commission that another Tigrayan man, believed to be linked to the suspects, was found hiding in a car belonging to the government security forces, tied up with ropes, taken to the bodies already burning and burned to death.”
The government has vowed to investigate the incident, which it described as a “very gruesome and inhuman act”.
“Whatever their motive is, the government will prosecute those who committed the horrible crime,” it said.
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Ethiopia has a population of 110 million, of whom about six million are Tigrayans. A civil war in the northern region of Tigray, led by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) against the federal government, has been raging for 16 months and has prompted accusations of killings, rape and torture.
The TPLF was forced to retreat to Tigray in December after a government offensive supported by foreign-made drones and thousands of militia. Since then fresh fighting has displaced 300,000 people in the neighbouring Afar region.
Earlier this month the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva said that Fatou Bensouda, the former chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, would lead its investigation into atrocities perpetrated by all sides during the conflict.
