Gunmen kill nine in western Ethiopia bus attack: state media

ADDIS ABABA Wed Apr 16, 2014 4:40am EDT

(Reuters) – Gunmen ambushed a bus carrying dozens of people in western Ethiopia near the Sudanese border, killing nine and wounding six others, state-run media said on Wednesday.

There was no claim of responsibility and no group was blamed for the attack, but Ethiopia says it has thwarted several plots in recent years by Ethiopian insurgents as well as Somali al Qaeda-linked al Shabaab Islamist militants.

A handful of rebel groups are waging low-level separatist insurgencies in Ethiopia, while Ethiopian troops are part of an offensive against al Shabaab in neighboring Somalia.

The bus ambush on Tuesday evening – near the $4 billion-Grand Renaissance Dam – was the second attack on public transportation in the Benishangul Gumuz region in five months. Four people were killed by a bomb on a minibus in November.

The Long Shadow of Rwanda on (Central) Africa

by Alemayehu G. Mariam

Déjà vu 1994 Rwanda in 2014 Central African Republic

Last week, the people of Rwanda began a solemn week of official mourning to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Rwanda Genocide. On April 6, 1994, Hutu extremist leaders in government, their political supporters and organized militiamen coordinated a systematic killing spree, which lasted over 100 days and consumed the lives of more than 800,000 mostly ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus. In 1994, Rwanda had a population of  5.5 million, of which 14 percent were Tutsi. Today Rwanda has a population of 11.5 million, of which the Tutsi population is less than 10 percent.