Hiiraan Online
By Shafi’i Mohyaddin
Sunday, February 02, 2014
Ethiopia has denied reports that it’s National Intelligence and Security Service abducted two senior ONLF negotiators from the Kenyan capital Nairobi last month. Despite abduction allegations from the ONLF, Ethiopian officials claim that Mr. Sulub Abdi Ahmed and Ali Ahmed Hussein defected to Ethiopia.
The Presidential Advisor to the Somali region of Ethiopia, Mr. Abdinur Abdulahi Farah, said that the two officials arrived in Ethiopia after prolonged discussions with the authorities of the Somali regional administration in Ethiopia.
“The officials who are Ali Ahmed Hussein and Sulub Abdi Ahmed are here in Ethiopia, they were not abducted, but they instead embraced peace and they will talk to the media in the next few days,” the Somali region’s presidential advisor told in an interview with VOA Somali service on Saturday.
He said that the two ONLF officials travelled from Nairobi on their own and then crossed the border into Ethiopia in a peaceful manner, denying ONLF claims that the men were snatched from the Kenyan capital Nairobi.
Last week the ONLF Foreign Secretary Abdirahman Sheik Mahdi accused Ethiopia’s intelligence services of kidnapping the two men from Kenya where they have been living for more than two decades.
The ONLF have rejected the notion that the officers peacefully surrendered themselves to the Ethiopian authorities as the officials involved have been part of the fight against Ethiopia for years.
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