At least 800 people were reportedly killed in Ethiopia when worshipers and soldiers risked their lives to protect the Holy Ark of the Covenant from local militias.
Ethiopian Christians claim that the ark – the wooden box built to contain the Ten Commandments of Moses – is safely kept in a chapel in the sacred northern city of Axum in the Tigray region.
The battle between Ethiopian soldiers and rebel fighters took place in the fall, The Sunday Times reported, but is only now being reported.
“When people heard the shooting, they ran to church to lend support to the priests and others who protected the Ark,” Getu Mak, a local university professor, told The Times.
“Certainly some of them were killed for that.”
Little was known about the deadly siege since Tigray was cut off from the world and journalists had been blocked from entering the region.
A deacon who lived in Axum told the Associated Press that he helped count the bodies, collected the victims’ identity cards, and helped bury them in mass graves.
He believes an estimated 800 people died in the church and around the city.
“When you attack Axum, you attack first of all the identity of Orthodox Tigrayans, but also of all Ethiopian Orthodox Christians,” Wolbert Smidt, an ethnohistorian specializing in the region, told the AP.
With pole wires