Warehouses containing aid in northern Ethiopia have been looted by both sides in the country's civil war, the head of a U.S. agency said.
State-run TV had initially aired an interview in which Sean Jones, who heads the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in Ethiopia, said fighters for the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) had looted every camp in the Amhara region as they made military advances.
But a transcript subsequently released by the U.S. Embassy showed that Jones also accused government troops and Eritreans of raiding aid warehouses in the region in past months.
"To be honest, throughout nine months of conflict, all of the warring parties have been stealing aid. Months ago when the federal forces aligned with Eritrean forces were in Tigray, there was a lot of theft that was occurring," read the transcript.
The statement came as killings and displacement continue in Ethiopia, in the ongoing conflict between the government and the northern region.
The Ethiopian government launched an offensive against the TPLF in the Tigray region in November after years of tension between the two.
The TPLF had dominated Ethiopia for more than 25 years until the government in Addis Ababa under Abiy Ahmed came to power in 2018.
"I do believe that TPLF has been very opportunistic ... in the Amhara (region) now we now know that the TPLF has in every town they have gone into have looted the warehouses,” Jones said.
"We are very confident that, in recent weeks, we have seen TPLF soldiers emptying some of the warehouses.”
