The Sudanese government on Monday said it has decided to recall its ambassador to Addis Ababa, accusing the Ethiopian army of executing seven of its soldiers and a civilian, reported Africa News.
“In an act that contravenes all conventions of war and international law, the Ethiopian army executed seven Sudanese soldiers and a citizen,” the army accused on Sunday.
On Monday, Sudan’s Foreign Ministry said the men had been abducted on June 22 in Sudanese territory and taken to Ethiopia. The army warned that such kind of perfidious act will not pass.
The Sudanese diplomat said it would immediately recall its ambassador to Ethiopia and summon the Ethiopian ambassador to Khartoum to directly condemn the killing.
Sudan also said it would file a complaint with the UN Security Council and regional organisations.
In response, Ethiopia’s foreign ministry said in a statement on Monday that the facts of the incident were misrepresented and that the deaths were a result of a skirmish between Sudanese soldiers, who they said had staged an incursion into Ethiopian land, and a local militia.
The statement said that the incident would be investigated.
Tensions between Sudan and Ethiopia have been brewing in recent years because of a spill over of the conflict in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region and Ethiopia’s construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) on the Blue Nile.
Tens of thousands of refugees have fled into eastern Sudan, and there have been frequent military clashes in an area of contested farmland along the border between Sudan and Ethiopia.
The two countries have also been locked in a decades-old dispute over the 260-square-kilometer border area of al-Fashqa, a patch of fertile agricultural borderland from which Khartoum expelled thousands of Ethiopian farmers in mid-December 2020. The escalation has since led to renewed clashes between the two countries.
