Lucy Kassa
@berhe_lucy
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Multi-award-winning journalist | bylines @guardian @BBCWorld @AJEnglish @latimes & others.I don’t have Facebook and Instagram accounts. [email protected]
Joined October 2017
My latest for @guardiannews . Tigrayan rebel forces have killed dozens of civilians during their latest occupation of the town of Kobo in Amhara,survivors claim. In one district of Kobo alone, witnesses counted 17 bodies of people killed over two days.
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Ethiopian and Eritrean armies may have used powerful incendiary weapons in civilian areas. Find my latest with @_Will_Brown in @Telegraph
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My latest for @BBCWorld.In organized campaign to dispose evidence of ethnic cleansing in Western Tigray, Amhara forces have been identified by eye witnesses deliberately destroying remains, digging up mass graves, exhumed hundreds of bodies,.
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I am still receiving cases of sexual violence. I feel like I can't stop listening to the stories. But every new case is horrific than the previous. It bleeds my heart and make me speechless. This is more than I can bear!.
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My latest for @Telegraph .Amhara Forces are throwing thousands of Tigrayans into makeshift "concentration camps", cutting off limbs & dumping mutilated bodies as part of an orchestrated ethnic purge. Satellite imagery partially corroborates sources.
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"Most were already eaten by wild animals. Others were half-eaten by dogs. Their bodies were torn into pieces; their faces were filled with insects.".Find my latest about the Temben massacre | via @telegraph
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"I am crying with joy. We were waiting for them. This is just a big day.".Find my report with @ZekuZelalem.and @_Will_Brown in @TelegraphWorld.
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The Amhara militiamen inserted into her genitals a hot metal rod that burned her uterus. "Our problem is with your womb. A Tigrean womb should never give birth" .Find my latest in Aljazeera
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Find my reflections on the emotional trauma I experienced while reporting the Tigray conflict in @newhumanitarian .
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"We were there to celebrate the birth of Virgin Mary. Suddenly, eight Ethiopian soldiers entered the churchyard. The soldiers picked 12 young deacons between the ages of 15 and 20. They took them out and shot them down,”. Find my latest from @Telegraph
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The weeks of starvation have made them lose significant weight. Worryingly, Kiflom has reached the point where he can no longer hold any food. Find my latest in @AJEnglish.‘No food for days’: Starvation stalks Tigray as war drags on via @AJEnglish.
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Of course you and your staff had been contacted and given chance to reply @AsratAtsedeweyn .It is not a claim.
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I was seeing the images of Haftom and the children who are starving because of the Tigray conflict. I am not going to mention who. But, the moment they saw me, the first thing most of them said was . "We apologise for the 2019 selection.".
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My latest for @guardiannews .Tigray authorities are systematically blocking and confiscating remittance to millions of hungry people in Tigray.
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My latest for @guardian .People in Tigray are taking dangerous smuggling route to escape forced recruitment, starvation death and "tyrannical rule" by TPLF authorities. Testimonies accused TPLF authorities of arbitrary arrest,aid embezzlement, tyranny and.
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Thank you @helenhayes_ for paying tribute to my hard work in today's UK Parliament debate. I am honoured.
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“I saw the Tigray fighters dragging out a mother and her teenage son from their house to the road.They viciously beat them.They were yelling at them:‘Your husband is an Amhara militiaman.’The mother was screaming:‘That’s not true. Please stop, leave my son. We don’t have guns’,”.
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My latest for @AJEnglish ."They protected civilians of other ethnicities and erased the Tigrayans,”.Afar militiamen and Eritrean troops massacred over 278 Tigrayan civilians in Abala, Afar region, in a house to house killing campaign two months ago.
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“They shot both the son and his mother in the head. The woman, who I know by sight as a local resident, was in her 60s and her son was 17 years old. They looted everything in my shop. They threatened me to give them all the money I have, or they would kill me. ”. Read full story.
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My latest for @globeandmail "Slaughtered like chickens".Ethiopia,Eritrea & Somalia denied their covert military alliance. But the Globe's investigation has provided,for the 1st time, extensive details of civilian killings by Somalia soldiers in Tigray.
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My latest for @VICEWorldNews.Locals are hopeful of an end to the worst of the conflict, but Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has pledged to "repel" the rebels.
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BBC focus on Africa interviewed Abdisalam Guled, Former Somali Intelligence Chief about my latest investigation for @globeandmail,in relation to the covert military alliance between Somalia, Eritrea and Ethiopia. Worth listening.
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My latest for @VICEWorldNews.He had gone hungry for two months. Ethiopian & Eritrean troops blocked aid to his home village.“There is no food in our village. My parents died. There were also other people dying."
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"The town was filled with corpses. The bodies of our friends and neighbors started to smell.We kept our grief to ourselves — the soldiers didn’t allow us to cry.”. This is how the Ethiopian army massacred hundreds of young men in two hours.
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‘We’re here to make you HIV positive’: Hundreds of women rush to Tigray hospitals as soldiers use rape as weapon of war ' | via @telegraph
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My latest for the @Globeandmail with @geoffreyyork.In an exclusive investigation in the village of Geregera in Amhara, underage survivors shared with us sickening accounts of gang rape by Tigray troops.
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On BBC Newshour (starting from min 34:11) I have explained about my latest report, the disposal of evidence of mass killing in Western Tigray.
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Lemlem*, 29, was at a cafe she owned with her two brothers and cousin in Mai Kadra on November 9 when four axe-wielding Amharic-speaking men walked in. When the attackers discovered the business belonged to Tigrayans, they hacked one of her brothers and a cousin to death.
Plus: @KiriRupiah on the sexist coverage of Tanzania’s new president; @aanuadeoye & @berhe_lucy on Ethiopia’s new exiles; and plenty more.
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My latest for the @globeandmail.“I could see the officers brutally beating them outdoors. They were bleeding. Then the officers took them to a dark room. At night I heard shootings coming from that dark room.
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My report about Ethiopia's year-long war for @TheNationalNews.
“You want to do these things where you don’t build doubt, distrust from the beginning”. To the bitter end: a year into Ethiopia's Tigray conflict and both sides vow to continue.
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burning them and then transporting what remains out of the region. This follows multiple reports of ethnic cleansing against Tigrayan population in Western Tigray. It also come in advance of the possible deployment of a UN independent investigation team which will be led by.
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@RAbdiAnalyst Thank you Rashid for the kind words. But to be clear this is not my opinion. As always, I am just presenting the facts and evidences as they are. It’s not about me. It’s about the what it is. That’s why I am asking people to leave me alone.
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former International Criminal Court prosecutor Fatou Bensouda. "In the plot of land behind Hamele Hamushete school in Humera, 200 bodies of ethnic Tigrayan civilians were buried in two mass graves. The Amhara militias and Fano exhumed the remains. They gathered wood, sprayed.
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"It all started following the visit of experts from Gonder University. When they came, they came with trucks that were loaded with chemicals in white jerry cans. The experts were in town for a few days giving trainings to the Amhara militia on how to dispose remains".
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something we never saw before and burned the remains. The remains crumbled and turned into ash.".Another eyewitness said,."The bodies belonged to civilians who were paraded from detention camps. There were around 100 bodies buried en masse behind the land of the public office.
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moving human remains. "On the morning of 10 April, the Amhara militias dug up the four mass graves in St. Aregawi church. There were 150 bodies massacred in the August wave of ethnic cleansing. They loaded the bodies into lorry. We don't know where they took the remains.
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My latest with @JaspJackson and @TownsendMark.Facebook’s continued promotion of hate makes it responsible for killings including Gebremichael Teweldmedhin, a Tigrayan jeweller abducted three months ago in Gonder, a city in the Amhara region.
Facebook ‘lets vigilantes in Ethiopia incite ethnic killing’
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In the interregnum, the allied forces of Ethiopia went from house to house and killed Tigrayan civilians including children, elderly and pregnant women.
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The massacre is carried out two days after the United Nations Human Rights Council passed a resolution to establish an independent investigation into violations by all parties. Ethiopia’s government objected to the resolution, calling it an “instrument of political pressure.”.
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In another town, Beaker, other eyewitnesses described similar activity. "The bodies belonged to 70 civilians who had been arrested in Beaker. They were massacred nine months ago. On 11 April the Amhara militia exhumed them and took them to Sanja, a town in the Amhara region.".
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of the Humera Agricultural Institute,". "They took the remains to the compound of the institute and turned them into ash using wood, fire, and chemicals that we don't know.".Adebay is another town in western Tigray where eyewitnesses have described the disposal of evidence by.
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“They came to our neighbourhood at midday as I was baking injera in the back yard. They shot my husband and 11 other Tigrayan neighbours they found around Among them were four boys under the age of five, killed alongside their parents.” said Asay Teka, a survivor.
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Communications are blocked. However, Al Jazeera managed to contact survivors on the ground and gathered first-hand evidence of the massacre, including graphic footage of bodies and mass burial.
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For the next five days, Asay hid in her house, staring at her husband’s corpse and praying the soldiers would not return. When the bloodletting slowed down on December 24, she fled.
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Witnesses say the collaborative efforts between Ethiopia and its allies led to an attack on Abala/Sheket, a town of predominantly Tigrayan people, in December. The invading military battled Tigrayan forces all of December 18, leading to the latter’s retreat from the area.
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In June 2021, Eritrean troops retreated from much of Tigray when the Tigray forces captured most of the region from the Ethiopian Federal Army. But Eritrea has since renewed its military partnership with the regional forces of Afar.
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Al Jazeera reached out repeatedly by email to the spokespeople of the Ethiopian Prime Minister's Office and Eritrea’s Information Minister Yemane Gebremeskel for comments.
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If someone is found operating outside this, the person will be charged with committing a crime, and the Tigray government can directly confiscate the money, based on the decision of a committee established for the task.
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On BBC Newshour (Starting at 37 min) today, I addressed some of the questions in relation to my latest report for the @globeandmail about gang rapes in Amhara region by Tigray troops.
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The committee is chaired by Fetlework Gebregziabher, vice president of the Tigray government. The decree is signed and stamped by Fetelework and has been in operation since April.
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They embezzle, and at times distribute the little aid that gets in based on political affiliation.". Read full story.
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“Of course, publicly they give many excuses. But the reality is they set up the posts to grab money at the expense of dying family members. I stopped the work after that incident. There was no guarantee to continue,” said Berket*, a former smuggler.
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There were teens as young as 12 between us, screaming in pain. That day they tortured me until I lost consciousness.”. After three months in detention, Medhanye was released last month when his friends and family raised enough money to pay a bribe of 100,000 birr (about $2,600).
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to the camp authorities. But those who cannot afford to pay are still in the camps, often undergoing torture and the threat of execution, he said.
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“There was 73,000 birr (£1,147) I tried to deliver. The money was sent to family members in a terrible condition with nothing to eat. Tigray authorities took the money. I was not given any valid reason by their officers.”.
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Smugglers blame Tigray authorities for systematically putting them out of operation by setting up border posts with officers who restrict, block and confiscate remittances, which have already been made illegal by the Ethiopian government.
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“Sometimes she counts them as five. Other times she said they were six. But she is certain about one thing: her abusers were uniformed fighters from Tigray.”. Others from the same village gave similar accounts. The first-hand testimonies are obtained independently, without any.
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@ZekuZelalem @onewm @simonallison Congratulations Zeku. I am overjoyed at your well-deserved nomination.Will keep my fingers crossed for you 😁💪.
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continued forced recruitment. "If caught by the Amhara Fano fighters you will be killed. You also risk being murdered by machete-wielding mobs of residents. They all hate Tigrayans and are often merciless. Even paying large amounts of money to smugglers cannot be a guarantee.
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Others accused Tigray authorities of confiscating the money for themselves at the checkpoints.
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They forcefully recruit, arbitrarily detain and decide whatever they want. On top of that, you see people dying from starvation and curable diseases due to the siege imposed by the Ethiopian government. It is death either way,” he says.
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of fuel. But even private trucks have access to fuel and are operating, let alone the government." says Tekele. "The aid that gets in is hardly reaching the starved. Meanwhile, TPLF authorities bother us everyday to contribute from what we have. They have absoulte power.
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An internal decree seen by the Guardian corroborates the testimonies. The decree states it is illegal to carry more than 100,000 birr, and cash which flows to the region should be reported to posts in the border.
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Blood was leaking from her vagina and anus.” .Her daughter, still in shock, could barely speak for days. Only weeks later did Zewde learn what happened, although her daughter is still uncertain of how many soldiers were involved in the rape. “She has nightmares,” Zewde said.
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