ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) – Ethiopia on Friday offered a reward of 10 million beers ($ 260,000) on Friday for information on the location of fugitive leaders of a rebel force in the northern Tigray region.
The money to help capture the leaders of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) was announced by state broadcaster EBC and sent to Twitter by a government working group.
TPLF leaders, probably hiding in the surrounding mountains since they lost the capital Tigray on November 28, said they were fighting. Reuters has not been able to contact them for comments for more than a week.
Thousands are believed to have been killed and nearly a million to flee their homes after two years of fighting between Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s government and the TPLF in the war in early November.
Some power and telephone connections have been re-established after a virtual outage since the federal offensive began on November 4th. But access to the media is still restricted and accounts on all sides are difficult to verify.
Aid agencies have warned of a humanitarian crisis in Tigray, where some 600,000 people were dependent on food aid just before the war.
The United Nations and other agencies are still pushing for secure access to most of the region.
The UN World Food Program sent 11 food trucks to two Eritrean refugee camps in southern Tigray that arrived in camps on Wednesday, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said.
Despite the arrival of aid, needs are growing, said OCHA spokesman Saviano Abreu. “People have been living for more than six weeks now without running water, without access to health services, without cash and very limited access to food.”
He said the United Nations was still negotiating with the Ethiopian government for full and unhindered access and reiterated the global body’s call for all parties to allow all aid groups in Tigray.
($ 1 = $ 38.6742)
(Reporting by Addis Ababa; Written by Maggie Fick; Edited by Peter Graff and Andrew Cawthorne)