NAIROBI, Kenya — An airstrike hit a busy market in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray village of Togoga on Tuesday and killed at least 51 people, according to health workers who said soldiers blocked medical teams from traveling to the scene.
An official with Tigray’s health bureau told The Associated Press that more than 100 other people were wounded, more than 50 seriously, and at least 33 people were still missing.
The alleged airstrike comes amid some of the fiercest fighting in the Tigray region since the conflict began in November as Ethiopian forces supported by those from neighboring Eritrea pursue Tigray’s former leaders.
Wounded patients being treated at Ayder hospital in the regional capital, Mekele, told doctors and a nurse that a plane dropped a bomb on Togoga’s marketplace. The patients included a 2-year-old child with “abdominal trauma” and a 6-year-old, the nurse said. An ambulance carrying a wounded baby to Mekele, about 37 miles away by road, was blocked for two hours and the baby died, the nurse added.
Hailu Kebede, foreign affairs head for the Salsay Woyane Tigray opposition party and who comes from Togoga, told the AP that one fleeing witness to the attack had counted more than 30 bodies in the remote village that’s linked to Mekele in part by challenging stretches of dirt roads.
“It was horrific,” said a staffer with an international aid group who told the AP he had spoken with a colleague and others at the scene. “We don’t know if the jets were coming from Ethiopia or Eritrea. They are still looking for bodies by hand.”
On Tuesday afternoon, a convoy of ambulances attempting to reach Togoga, about 15 miles west of Mekele, was turned back by soldiers near Tukul, the health workers said. Several more ambulances were turned back later in the day and on Wednesday morning, but one group of medical workers reached the site Tuesday evening via a different route.
“We have been asking, but until now we didn’t get permission to go, so we don’t know how many people are dead,” said one of the doctors in Mekele.
Another doctor said the Red Cross ambulance he was traveling in on Tuesday while trying to reach the scene was shot at twice by Ethiopian soldiers, who held his team for 45 minutes before ordering them back to Mekele.
“We are not allowed to go,” he said. “They told us whoever goes, they are helping the troops of the TPLF.”
The TPLF refers to the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, which governed Tigray until it was ousted by a federal government offensive in November. The subsequent fighting has killed thousands and forced more than 2 million people from their homes.
This month, humanitarian agencies warned that 350,00 people in Tigray are facing famine.
