Ethiopia’s Attorney General has made damning revelations against Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed.
They include the role played by the security agencies in planning an attempted assassination.
Abiy, who became premier in April and has since implemented a reformist agenda, survived a grenade attack at a rally in the capital in June.
The Authorities arrested five people in September, saying they were members of the formerly exiled Oromo Liberation Front that Prime Minister Abiy had pardoned.
Attorney General Berhanu Tsegaye said evidence showed “the senior leadership of the national security agency” told members of Abiy’s Oromo ethnic group to attack him at the rally.
“The evidence we gathered shows that the senior leadership of the national security agency instructed Oromos to carry out the attack because it would mean that the prime minister an Oromo was killed by Oromos,” the attorney general told a press conference.
The assertion is jolting in an ethnically diverse country that has seen recent ethnic clashes and because Abiy is the ruling coalition’s first Oromo leader.
“It would (also) give the impression that he is not endorsed by the Oromo population,” Berhanu added.
