Prisoners Tortured to Death in Jail Ogaden

Prisoners Tortured to Death in Jail Ogaden

Our sources in Ogaden have confirmed that at least eleven prisoners have been tortured to death in the infamous Jail Ogaden prison located in Jigjiga, Ogaden.

Last week, the prison authorities brought out the corpses of two women and a man with severe torture marks on their bodies and told their relatives to bury them. The two women were pregnant and had given birth in the prison, one with twins who died with their mother and the other with a child who luckily survived.

The survived child was found sucking the breast of his dead mother in the cell two nights later.

The names of the victims are as follows:

 1. Qureesh Mohamed Xaashi  (the mother of the twins).
 2. Ikraan Ali Mahad (the dead mother whose child had survived).
 3. The name of the other victim is Ganbeyse Adan Sanweyne;  a middle-aged man who was incarcerated in Jail Ogaden for long time.

The rest of the victims are hidden from their relatives and it is believed they are buried in secret graves, a practice which is common these days in Ogaden.

In September last year, the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (EHRC), a government run body, announced that it will visit prisons in Ethiopia to assess prison conditions. Nothing has come-out of this announcement, and to our knowledge the EHRC has not yet visited the concentration camp-like makeshift prison camps which dot the Ogaden landscape.  

The people of Ogaden are not expecting justice and humanity from the institutions of the Ethiopian regime, such as the EHRC, which is known to cover-up the regime’s human rights violations.  

The International Red Cross is still denied access to the Ogaden since 2007.

More recently, last week the Ethiopian regime denied permission to visit the infamous Kalita prison to a delegation from the European Parliament’s Subcommittee on Human Rights who were in Ethiopia to assess the human rights situation and prison conditions in the country.