Joint Statement on the Acquittal of the Men Convicted of Killing Zewdu Haftu and the Evidence That Was Never Produced

In the strongest possible terms, we, the undersigned Tigrayan civil society and women’s organizations, condemn the decision of the Mekelle City Middle-Level Court on August 4, 2026 to acquit and release Yared Gebreselassie and Angesom Hailemariam, the two men that same court convicted in July 2025 of the killing of Zewdu Haftu and sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labour. On the evening of August 19, 2023, a vehicle without plates stopped beside Zewdu Haftu and her friend Semhal Gebregziabiher on a busy street in Mekelle. When Zewdu resisted what witnesses described as an attempted sexual assault, she was dragged by her hair and crushed beneath the vehicle. Her sister, Birtukan Haftu, has described the reversal as a second death.

These men were not acquitted because new evidence exonerated them. Following their conviction, the Tigray Supreme Court rejected their appeal and confirmed the sentence. The Cassation Bench then remanded the case with a specific instruction: that the original digital evidence held by the National Intelligence and Security Service be produced and verified, and that a qualified expert appear to explain it. That instruction was never carried out. The Tigray Police Commission did not obtain the original record, reportedly because federal experts could not travel to Mekelle under present political conditions. No further evidence was examined and no expert testified. On precisely the record that had produced a conviction, the court reached the opposite conclusion, and it did so without requiring the defendants to mount a defence at all. One of the three judges dissented, holding that the evidence raised sufficient suspicion to require them to answer it.

The failure to produce that evidence must be examined, and not accepted at face value. The institution that failed to obtain it is the Tigray Police Commission. Its serving Deputy Commissioner, Colonel Gebreselassie Belay, is the father of the first defendant and a relative of the second. Whatever obstacles the breakdown between Mekelle and Addis Ababa placed in the path of this prosecution, they do not explain why the one body with an interest in the outcome was left to discharge the order alone, why no alternative means of verification was sought, and why the prosecutor did not press for one before the case was terminated. This is the reason given. It is not an answer.

This is not the first irregularity in this case, which was obstructed at nearly every stage. Semhal Gebregziabiher, the sole surviving eyewitness, was removed from her hospital bed without medical discharge, brought before a judge without legal representation, and held for more than eight months without a single charge. Judges reported pressure throughout the trial and at one point ceased work entirely. In May 2025, relatives of the accused disrupted proceedings in Mekelle, triggering a judicial strike and the closure of courts across the city. Tigray’s authorities pledged to defend judicial independence and punish those responsible, and nothing followed. When the conviction was handed down, Zewdu’s family were barred from entering the courtroom.

Her killing was not an isolated tragedy. In the year that followed, twelve women were murdered in Mekelle and eighty rape cases were reported, according to the region’s police commissioner. In June 2024, after sixteen-year-old Mahlet Teklay was confirmed killed months after her abduction, women marched on the regional government headquarters in Mekelle carrying photographs of Zewdu Haftu, among them women who had fought in the war. Their placards said they had chased the enemy and would not now be killed by their brothers. No one has been held to account for Zewdu’s killing, and no one has been held to account for the disruption of the courts that tried it.

The consequences reach far beyond the two men released. Every woman and girl in Tigray has now been shown that a conviction obtained at the highest evidentiary standard, upheld on appeal, and reached in the face of open intimidation of the court, can be undone without a single new fact being established. Every witness who might come forward in a future case has seen what was done to Semhal Gebregziabiher. Every judge, prosecutor, and investigator who worked this case is now more exposed than the men they convicted. Perpetrators of gender-based violence in Tigray must not be permitted to act, and to be freed, in the confidence that proximity to authority operates as a defence in law.

Zewdu Haftu was 32 years old, the eldest of her family’s children, raised in the May Anbesa area of Mekelle by a father who worked as a guard and a mother who brewed and sold tella. She had graduated in accounting. On the evening she was killed, during Ashenda, she had gone out to mark a friend’s birthday. Her father did not live to see the verdict in her case. He died of grief. Three years on, her mother and her sister are still waiting.

Our first and most urgent demand is that the Tigray Justice Bureau and the region’s prosecuting authorities appeal this decision without delay. Beyond it, we are calling for:

• The National Regional Government of Tigray to publicly commit to the integrity of this prosecution, to commission the examinations set out below, and to honour the pledge it made in May 2025 to defend judicial independence and hold accountable those who disrupted the courts;
• Tigray’s prosecutors to compel production of the original digital record held by the National Intelligence and Security Service, and to secure the expert examination the Cassation Bench ordered, by remote testimony if travel is not possible;
• The publication in full of the August 4 decision, the dissenting opinion, and the remand order;
• A public account from the Tigray Police Commission of the steps it took to obtain that evidence;
• The suspension of Deputy Police Commissioner Colonel Gebreselassie Belay from his post for the duration of that examination, given that the institution he leads failed to execute a court order in a prosecution of his son, and his removal, together with that of any other official related to the defendants, from any role bearing on this case;
• An independent examination of how an order of the court in a murder prosecution went unexecuted;
• An examination of the conduct of the prosecution in this case, including why no application was made to compel the verification the Cassation Bench ordered before the case was terminated;
• Written and practical guarantees of the safety of Birtukan Haftu and her family, of Semhal Gebregziabiher, and of the judges, prosecutors, and investigators who worked this case, including those who ruled against the defendants and those who continued to sit under pressure, and witness protection adequate to cases involving members of the security establishment;
• Survivor-centered legal support and protection for women and girls reporting gender-based violence in Tigray as a matter of course, not as an exception secured by public outcry; and
• UN Women, the Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, and Tigrayan and international women’s rights organizations to seek a full accounting of this reversal, and to treat it as a measure of whether the commitments made to Tigrayan women survive contact with a case involving a serving senior official.

Zewdu Haftu’s family waited three years and trusted the law. What they received was a verdict overturned on evidence no one examined, in a proceeding the defendants were never required to answer. It is owed to them, and to every woman and girl in Tigray watching what happens next, that this decision be appealed, explained, and corrected.

Signatories,

1. Omna Tigray
2. Gender Empowerment Movement Tigray (GEM Tigray)
3. Harambee Collective
4. MAEGER – Tigray Women’s Association in North America (MTWANA)
5. Security and Justice for Tigrayans (SJT)