Hitherto unseen CCTV footage has shed light on the death of Lucas Villa. The 37-year-old student became a symbol of street protests in Colombia after being gunned down in Pereira earlier this year.
On an arid plateau somewhere in Ethiopia, a man in uniform pushes a dead body which goes tumbling head over heels off the edge of a cliff. More corpses are strewn around nearby rocks and boulders.
The scene comes from one of five graphic videos which started appearing from 9 March, 2021, on the EthiopiaMap Telegram channel. Viewed together, they show Amharic-speaking soldiers, one of whose uniforms bears the markings of the Ethiopian national flag on its sleeve, rounding up a group of around 25 to 30 people in civilian clothing. The captives file towards a precipice at gunpoint, where they are executed.
These videos were taken by the soldiers (mostly male and some female) themselves.
Vessels from the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, Frontex, have been complicit in maritime “pushback” operations to drive away refugees and migrants attempting to enter the European Union via Greek waters, a joint investigation by Bellingcat, Lighthouse Reports, Der Spiegel, ARD and TV Asahi has found.
Open source data suggests Frontex assets were actively involved in one pushback incident at the Greek-Turkish maritime border in the Aegean Sea, were present at another and have been in the vicinity of four more since March.
Although Frontex assets were not at the immediate scene of those latter four incidents, the signature of a pushback is distinctive, and would likely have been visible on radar, with visual tools common on such vessels or to the naked eye.