At least 16 people were injured, three seriously, on Friday as Ethiopian police moved to quell unrest in at least two parts of the capital on the second and final day of celebrations marking the Orthodox Epiphany, or Timkat, hospital officials said.
The wounded, most of them with bullet injuries, included three men who were shot in the abdomen, chest and pelvis respectively. The men were in critical condition and undergoing emergency surgery at the Menelik hospital in Addis Ababa, doctors said.
Among the others wounded, two were women and several had been beaten with police truncheons or hit by rocks apparently thrown by demonstrators who joined up with religious processions around the city, chanting anti-government slogans and throwing stones at police, they said.
”I was carrying my baby and going to the church in the procession when everybody started running and I got shot in the leg,” said Serhalem Argaw, a 22-year-old woman being treated for a bullet wound just above her left ankle.
Wubishit Solomon, a 17-year-old student, said he had been running from police when he was hit with a bullet that passed through his neck.
”I was running away from the police when I got shot,” he said. ”I was celebrating Timkat, singing.”
Earlier, witnesses and an Agence France-Presse correspondent reported hearing gunfire and explosions on procession routes near the British and French embassies in the north and north-western parts of Addis Ababa.
”We heard shooting outside the French embassy when the procession was passing by,” said one witness, a diplomat, near the French mission in the northern part of the capital.
The patients being treated at the Menelik hospital ”were all coming from around the British embassy”, a medical source said.
On Thursday, similar unrest around Timkat processions left at least four people wounded, including one with a gunshot wound, amid continuing tension over disputed elections last year and a crackdown on the opposition after two eruptions of deadly violence in the capital.
Witnesses said some in the crowds of people celebrating the baptism of Jesus Christ had become unruly and were throwing stones, and that rocks littered many streets where the processions of several hundred people each had been marching.
Timkat, a colourful, raucous and ultimately water-drenched festival, ranks second in importance only to Christmas for the country’s 40-million Orthodox Church followers and routinely draws tens of thousands into Addis Ababa’s streets each January 19 and 20.
It is marked by huge crowds of white-clad revellers marching to relentless drum beats behind elaborately dressed priests covered in jewel-encrusted velvet and satin robes, holding aloft replicas of the Ark of the Covenant — the vessel in which the Biblical Ten Commandments are believed to have been held and which the Orthodox Church here maintains is located in Ethiopia.
On the second day of Timkat, the Ark of the Covenant replicas are returned to the churches in which they are held. — Sapa-AFP