The Bahir Dar killings

Seventy-two hours

Four political assassinations, one “coup attempt” the government’s own attorney general struggled to explain, and the decapitation of the reform coalition that had elevated Abiy

Filed July 2019, with retrospective additions

The most consequential 72-hour sequence of Abiy Ahmed’s premiership, after his inauguration itself, occurred between the evening of Saturday 22 June 2019 and the morning of Monday 24 June 2019. By the end of those three days, the President of the Amhara Region was dead. His Attorney General was dead. His senior advisor was dead. The Chief of the General Staff of the Ethiopian National Defence Forces was dead, killed inside his own home in Addis Ababa by his own bodyguard. The retired Major General who had been keeping the Chief of Staff company that evening was also dead. The man identified by the federal government as the orchestrator of all five killings, the head of the Amhara Regional Peace and Security Bureau, was dead, shot by federal security forces near Bahir Dar after a 36-hour manhunt. The federal government’s official designation of these events would settle, by November 2019, on the formula of a “failed coup attempt.” Almost none of the people who studied the events in detail came away from them entirely convinced.

The structural fact, regardless of attribution, was unambiguous. In a single weekend, the most prominent Amhara reformist politician in the federal coalition and the senior Tigrayan officer in the Ethiopian military had both been killed. The Abiy reform coalition, which had depended on the integration of Amhara and Oromo reformists against TPLF and Amhara-nationalist resistance, had lost two of its three Amhara reformist anchors (the third, Gedu Andargachew, had resigned three months earlier). And the political space inside Amhara Region, which the dead president had been trying to hold for the Prosperity-oriented current, opened up for the harder Amhara-nationalist current that would, four years later, produce the Fano insurgency.

The events were over in 72 hours. The political effects are still running through Ethiopian politics in 2026.

To make sense of what happened, two background facts need to be in place.

The first is that the Amhara political scene through 2018–2019 was already fissuring along the same lines that would later produce the Fano insurgency. The Amhara reformist current within the EPRDF coalition — represented by the Amhara National Democratic Movement, soon to be renamed the Amhara Democratic Party — had been allied with Lemma Megersa’s OPDO reformists in the run-up to Abiy’s elevation. Its key figures were Gedu Andargachew, who had been the Amhara regional president since 2013 and was the most senior Amhara figure in the federal cabinet; Ambachew Mekonnen, the technocratic regional administrator who became regional president in March 2019; and Demeke Mekonnen, the ANDM/ADP chairman who was Abiy’s deputy prime minister. The harder Amhara-nationalist current, which lived partly inside the ADP and partly in civil society and exile diaspora networks, took a very different view of the Abiy project. It read the Prosperity-oriented agenda as insufficient on the questions that mattered most to Amhara political identity: the return of Welkait and Raya from Tigray, the political rehabilitation of Amhara identity as the carrier of historic Ethiopian state-building, the protection of Amhara communities living as minorities in Oromia and Benishangul-Gumuz from inter-ethnic violence, and the resistance to any federal-government drift toward ethnic-federalist concessions that would entrench what the harder nationalists viewed as the post-1991 dismemberment of Ethiopia.

In March 2019, Gedu resigned the Amhara regional presidency for unstated reasons and was reassigned to the federal Foreign Ministry. His farewell speech contained an unusual warning: “the rising danger of narrow nationalism” was, he said, increasing tensions between Amharas and Tigrayans. The phrasing was vague; the referent was not. Gedu was warning, on his way out the door, that the harder Amhara-nationalist current was gaining political ground in Amhara Region and that the consequences could be severe. His successor, Ambachew Mekonnen, was a technocrat — civil engineer by training, university administrator by career, soft-spoken, allied to Demeke and to the Lemma-Abiy reform coalition. Ambachew was, in the Amhara political ecosystem of 2019, exactly the figure the reform coalition needed: institutionally credible, personally inoffensive, unmistakably aligned with the federal centre.

The second background fact is the man who would, in June 2019, become the central character of the weekend: Brigadier General Asaminew Tsige.

Asaminew was 58 years old at the time of his death. He had been a senior ENDF officer during the TPLF-dominated decade of the 2000s. In 2009 he had been arrested by Meles Zenawi’s government, along with approximately twenty other ENDF officers, on charges of plotting a coup d’état. The charges, which Asaminew and his co-defendants consistently denied, were widely viewed at the time and afterwards as having been a manufactured framing of an internal ENDF faction whose Amhara-nationalist sympathies the TPLF considered a security threat. Asaminew was sentenced to life imprisonment. He served nine years in Kaliti and Kilinto prisons. In early 2018, as part of the prisoner releases that Hailemariam Desalegn’s caretaker cabinet had authorised in January and that Abiy had accelerated through June, Asaminew was released. Abiy’s government restored his military pension and, in early 2019, Ambachew Mekonnen’s regional government appointed him head of the Amhara Region Peace and Security Bureau. [VOA, “Analysts Unsure Why General Killed Amhara Region President,” 25 June 2019, https://www.voanews.com/a/analysts-unsure-why-general-killed-amhara-region-governor/4972894.html]

The appointment was, by Human Rights Watch researcher Felix Horne’s later analysis in Foreign Policy, a deliberate political calculation by the Amhara regional government: a bid to “appease the rising Amhara nationalists” by bringing a credible Amhara-nationalist figure into the regional security apparatus. The calculation was that Asaminew, who carried real political weight with Amhara-nationalist constituencies, would serve as a bridge between Ambachew’s reformist administration and the harder current. The risk was that he would do the opposite — that he would use the regional security infrastructure to build precisely the kind of armed Amhara-nationalist force that would, in due course, become independent of, or even hostile to, the reformist administration that had empowered him.

Through spring 2019, Asaminew did exactly that. He gave speeches with what reporters later characterised as “incendiary” Amhara-nationalist rhetoric. In a graduation address to Amhara regional security forces in June 2019, he told the assembled cadets that the Amhara people needed to “arm themselves” against unspecified threats. He authorised the open recruitment of ethnic Amhara militias under the regional security framework, expanding rather than absorbing the irregular formations that had been forming on the Amhara-Tigray and Amhara-Oromia borders. He developed political relationships with diaspora Amhara-nationalist groups, including outlets in the United States that openly called for the dismantling of the federal-Tigrayan administrative arrangement over Welkait. He began, by the federal Attorney General’s later account, building “parallel security structures” inside the formal Amhara security apparatus — units that reported to him personally rather than through the regional chain of command.

By mid-June 2019, the Amhara regional cabinet under Ambachew had concluded that Asaminew’s parallel build-up had to be addressed. A cabinet meeting was scheduled in Bahir Dar for the evening of Saturday 22 June. The agenda included, according to Reuters sources, Asaminew’s recruitment of ethnic militias and the question of whether his Peace and Security Bureau was operating within or outside the regional administrative framework.

Asaminew did not attend the cabinet meeting as a participant. According to the federal government’s subsequent account, he sent a “hit squad” of officers from the Peace and Security Bureau into the meeting. They opened fire. Ambachew Mekonnen, the Amhara regional president, was killed. His senior advisor Ezez Wassie was killed. The Amhara Regional Attorney General Migbaru Kebede was severely wounded; he died of his wounds on 24 June. By Brigadier General Tefera Mamo’s subsequent account, “most of the people who attempted the coup” were arrested in the immediate aftermath; Asaminew himself, however, escaped.

Approximately three hours later in Addis Ababa, 500 kilometres south, General Se’are Mekonnen, Chief of the General Staff of the ENDF, was at home. He was the most senior ethnic-Tigrayan officer in the federal military and had been Chief of Staff since June 2018 — a year almost to the day. He was responsible for the federal military’s response to the events unfolding in Bahir Dar; the federal government’s later account characterises him as having been preparing such a response when his bodyguard turned and shot him. Major General Gizae Aberra, a retired senior officer who was with Se’are at the home, was also killed. The bodyguard, whose name was given variously in early federal accounts (initial reports said he was arrested; later reports said he was killed at the scene), was identified by federal investigators as having been recruited by Asaminew specifically for the purpose of killing the Chief of Staff. The federal Attorney General, Berhanu Tsegaye, would later explain in his November 2019 press briefing that the plot’s design had been to kill Se’are first; then, when Deputy Chief of Staff General Berhanu Jula arrived at Se’are’s home in response to the news, to kill him as well. The second killing did not occur because the bodyguard was killed before Berhanu Jula’s arrival or because the federal security response moved faster than the plotters had anticipated.

In the early hours of Sunday 23 June, Abiy Ahmed addressed the nation on state television. He was dressed in ENDF uniform — a notable choice, given that the Prime Minister had not worn military uniform in public since his elevation. He confirmed Ambachew’s death and the attack on Se’are. He attributed both events to a coordinated plot led by Asaminew and characterised the perpetrators as “mercenaries” and “hired elements” who had been “bought” by “anti-reform” forces. He announced a nationwide internet shutdown — a measure that had been used before but never on this scale — and a heightened security posture across Amhara and Addis Ababa. The internet shutdown would last more than a week. [Al Jazeera, “Ethiopia’s Amhara state chief killed amid regional coup attempt,” 23 June 2019, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/6/23/ethiopias-amhara-state-chief-killed-amid-regional-coup-attempt; NPR, “Ethiopia Army Chief Killed In Attempted Coup, Government Says,” 23 June 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/06/23/735236160/ethiopia-army-chief-killed-in-attempted-coup-government-says]

Asaminew remained at large for 36 hours. On the afternoon of Monday 24 June, federal security forces located him in Zenzelma, a rural area approximately 20 kilometres outside Bahir Dar. According to the federal account, he was shot dead during a manhunt after refusing to surrender. Several of his alleged co-conspirators were detained in the same operation. By the evening of 24 June, the federal government’s narrative was complete: Asaminew, a recently released political prisoner and a known Amhara nationalist, had attempted a coup against the reformist regional government in Bahir Dar and against the senior Tigrayan officer in the federal military, in a coordinated 500-kilometre operation, with the goal of seizing control of the regional administration and decapitating the federal security command. The attempt had failed. The principal perpetrators were dead or in custody. The reform agenda would continue.

The November 2019 follow-up by Attorney General Berhanu Tsegaye fleshed out the narrative. Fifteen people had been killed in the combined incidents (the four officials named above plus the bodyguard and several Asaminew operatives in the Bahir Dar attack, plus Asaminew himself in the manhunt); twenty wounded; charges to be filed against 68 suspects, 55 of them from Bahir Dar and 13 from Addis Ababa. Asaminew had recruited a Private from within the ENDF in Gondar; the Private had been promised “money and a better position” once the plotters controlled the government; the Private had communicated with Mesafint, the bodyguard who killed Se’are. The plot was characterised as having used “a vast network of parallel security structure as well as government infrastructure and budget” — language that, on close reading, suggested the involvement of federal-government and regional-government actors beyond the named Asaminew cell, though no senior federal or regional figure was ever named as a co-conspirator. [Addis Standard, “Breaking: Attorney General says June 22 Amhara region senior leaders, army chief Gen. Seare assassinations led by Bir. Gen Asaminew Tsige,” 13 November 2019, https://addisstandard.com/breaking-attorney-general-says-june-22-amhara-region-senior-leaders-army-chief-gen-seare-assassinations-led-by-bir-gen-asaminew-tsige/]

The Asaminew-led-coup narrative is the one that became the federal government’s official account, the one the international press largely adopted, and the one that anchors the Wikipedia entry on the events. Its central claim — that Asaminew planned and executed both the Bahir Dar killings and the Addis Ababa killings — is internally consistent and supported by the federal Attorney General’s investigation. It is also incompatible with several elements of the available evidence, which is the reason that careful Ethiopian and outside observers have never fully accepted it.

The skeptical reading goes as follows. A regional “coup” that consisted of killing four officials in a cabinet meeting, while not seizing television stations, the regional parliament, the airport, or the federal military base in Bahir Dar, was not, in any operational sense, a coup. As the Ethiopian journalist Zecharias Zelalem put it in a contemporaneous VOA interview: “I don’t see how the narrative of a coup in a regional government could be legitimate. Taking over the regional capital would not guarantee you any sort of control of the region whatsoever. You still have to deal with the fact there are federal army bases in the region.” A killing of senior officials is not a coup; it is a political assassination. The labelling matters because the “coup” framing legitimised the federal government’s subsequent crackdown — including mass arbitrary detentions of Amhara political activists, the internet shutdown, and the restructuring of the Amhara regional security apparatus — as proportionate emergency responses, when in fact they were political consolidation operations.

The skeptical reading further notes the following. Se’are Mekonnen was the senior ethnic Tigrayan officer in the federal military, at a moment when the Tigrayan-federal political relationship was deteriorating rapidly. His killing eliminated the most important Tigrayan voice in the federal security command. The federal-government framing attributed his death to a Bahir Dar-based Amhara-nationalist plot; the practical effect was to remove a Tigrayan general at a moment when the Abiy administration’s increasingly confrontational posture toward the TPLF required exactly such a removal. The skeptical reading does not necessarily assert that Abiy ordered the killing — there is no evidence for that proposition, and the Asaminew-led-plot account remains the best-evidenced reconstruction available — but it observes that the killing’s beneficiary was the federal centralisation project, not the Amhara-nationalist current that Asaminew represented. A successful Amhara-nationalist coup would not have been served by killing the Tigrayan Chief of Staff; that killing made sense only in a political context where the Chief of Staff’s removal had value independent of the regional question.

The skeptical reading is also suspicious of Asaminew’s death. He was killed in the manhunt rather than captured. He never gave a public account of his alleged plot. The 68 alleged co-conspirators against whom charges were filed never produced, in any subsequent trial, a confession or testimony that disclosed coordination with figures outside the named cell. The plot’s connection between Bahir Dar and Addis Ababa rested, in the Attorney General’s account, on a single recruited Private and a single bodyguard, both of whom died at the scene. The evidentiary chain that connected the regional assassination of Ambachew to the federal assassination of Se’are was, when examined closely, thinner than the November 2019 press briefing implied.

What can be said with confidence is the following. The Bahir Dar killings were executed by a unit of officers from the Amhara Region Peace and Security Bureau, which was under Asaminew’s command. Whether Asaminew personally ordered the attack, or whether elements of his command structure operated semi-autonomously, or whether he was himself the convenient frame for an attack ordered by others, has not been independently established and probably never will be. The Addis Ababa killings of Se’are and Gizae Aberra were executed by Se’are’s bodyguard. Whether the bodyguard was acting on Asaminew’s recruitment, on someone else’s recruitment, or on his own political motivations, has also not been independently established. Asaminew’s involvement at some level — given his speeches in the weeks before, his arming of irregular militias, his political alignment with the Amhara-nationalist current opposing the regional cabinet that the killings targeted — is the most parsimonious available account, but it is not the only one consistent with the evidence.

The political consequences of the seventy-two hours are unambiguous regardless of which attribution one finds most credible.

First, the Amhara reformist current was decapitated. Ambachew Mekonnen was replaced by Temesgen Tiruneh, a former federal Trade Minister who was politically more allied with Demeke Mekonnen than with the original Lemma-Ambachew reform axis. Migbaru Kebede was replaced by a regional civil servant. The institutional figures who had been the Amhara reformist current’s regional anchor were gone, and their replacements lacked their political authority. Within twelve months, the Amhara regional administration’s posture toward the federal centre had hardened; within twenty-four months, Amhara Special Forces under Temesgen would be one of the principal federal-aligned military formations in the Tigray war; within forty-eight months, Temesgen himself would be promoted to head the National Intelligence and Security Service, and the Amhara reformist current would have ceased to exist as a meaningful political force.

Second, the senior Tigrayan voice in the federal security command was eliminated. Se’are’s successor as Chief of Staff was Adem Mohammed, who lasted until November 2020; he was replaced by Berhanu Jula — the same Berhanu Jula who had been the second target of the alleged plot, and who would lead the ENDF through the Tigray war. The transition broke the institutional pattern, in place since 1991, of a Tigrayan or Tigrayan-allied senior officer at the top of the federal military. The political signal to the TPLF was unmistakable: the federal security command, which had been the principal Tigrayan institutional foothold in the federal state, no longer included a senior Tigrayan voice. The TPLF’s subsequent decision to retain its own military command structure inside Tigray — including the Tigray Regional Special Forces, the formations that would defect to the TDF in November 2020 — was made considerably easier by the recognition that there were no longer senior Tigrayan officers in Addis capable of brokering an alternative.

Third, the Lemma-Abiy reform coalition lost its institutional ballast. Lemma Megersa, the OPDO chairman who had stepped aside for Abiy in March 2018, had been counting on Ambachew and the Amhara reformist current to balance Abiy’s own centralising tendencies within the reform coalition. With Ambachew dead and the Amhara reformist current decapitated, Lemma’s leverage inside the cabinet was sharply reduced. By the end of 2019, Lemma was openly disagreeing with Abiy on the question of dissolving the EPRDF into the Prosperity Party. By summer 2020, he was out of cabinet. By December 2020, he was under house arrest. The trajectory from Bahir Dar to Lemma’s marginalisation was not the only causal pathway, but it was a significant one.

Fourth, the harder Amhara-nationalist current — the one Asaminew had been recruiting and arming — was not eliminated. It was deprived of its most prominent recent leader, and it lost its formal institutional foothold in the regional Peace and Security Bureau. But the political constituency that had been responding to Asaminew’s speeches, the diaspora networks that had been channelling money and political support to Amhara-nationalist projects, the irregular militia formations that had been forming on the Amhara-Tigray and Amhara-Oromia borders — none of those was dismantled by the events of June 2019. They were temporarily decapitated and then reorganised. The Fano insurgency that would erupt in April 2023 traces its political genealogy, in significant part, to the Amhara-nationalist constituency that Asaminew had been mobilising in 2019. The federal government’s failure to address that constituency politically — neither by accommodating its territorial demands on Welkait, nor by integrating its political voice into the Prosperity Party project, nor by demilitarising its militia formations — meant that the same constituency, four years later, would produce an insurgency that the federal government has, in 2026, been unable to defeat.

Fifth, the international press coverage moved on. The Bahir Dar killings received roughly a week of major-outlet attention. By July 2019 they had been displaced by other Ethiopian stories — the GERD negotiations, the upcoming election, the Nobel speculation. By October 2019, when Abiy was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the events of June were not mentioned in the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s citation or in the international coverage of the award. The committee saw a leader who had made peace with Eritrea and was reforming a closed political system. It did not see — or did not weight — a leader whose government had just experienced the largest political assassination event in modern Ethiopian history, whose reformist coalition had been decapitated, and whose federal security command had been restructured by the killing of its senior Tigrayan officer. The Bahir Dar story did not survive in the international narrative because it complicated the narrative the international observers had committed to.

The seventy-two hours of June 2019 were, in retrospect, the moment at which the Abiy reform project ceased to be a coalition project and became a personal one. The institutional figures who had constrained and supported Abiy in equal measure — Lemma Megersa, Ambachew Mekonnen, the senior Tigrayan officers in the ENDF — were either dead, marginalised, or about to be. The political distance between the centralising executive in Addis and the regional political constituencies on whom the federal coalition depended — Tigrayan, Amhara-nationalist, Oromo — widened sharply in the months that followed. By December 2019, the EPRDF would be dissolved. By November 2020, the Tigray war would begin. By April 2023, the Amhara war would begin.

The man who walked into the Bahir Dar regional cabinet meeting on the evening of 22 June 2019 — whoever he was acting for, whatever his organisational chain of command — set in motion a chain of consequences that has not stopped running.

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Sources for Article 4

1. Wikipedia, “Amhara Region coup attempt,” accessed June 2026 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amhara_Region_coup_attempt
2. Al Jazeera, “Ethiopia’s Amhara state chief killed amid regional coup attempt,” 23 June 2019 — https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/6/23/ethiopias-amhara-state-chief-killed-amid-regional-coup-attempt
3. NPR, “Ethiopia Army Chief Killed In Attempted Coup, Government Says,” 23 June 2019 — https://www.npr.org/2019/06/23/735236160/ethiopia-army-chief-killed-in-attempted-coup-government-says
4. Addis Standard, “Breaking: Attorney General says June 22 Amhara region senior leaders, army chief Gen. Seare assassinations led by Bir. Gen Asaminew Tsige,” 13 November 2019 — https://addisstandard.com/breaking-attorney-general-says-june-22-amhara-region-senior-leaders-army-chief-gen-seare-assassinations-led-by-bir-gen-asaminew-tsige/
5. AllAfrica, “Ethiopia: Attorney General Says June 22 Amhara Region Senior Leaders, Army Chief Gen. Seare Assassinations Led By Bir. Gen Asaminew Tsige,” 14 November 2019 — https://allafrica.com/stories/201911140523.html
6. Anadolu Agency, “Ethiopia: Taking layers off mysterious coup attempt,” 27 June 2019 — https://www.aa.com.tr/en/africa/ethiopia-taking-layers-off-mysterious-coup-attempt/1516995
7. VOA, “Analysts Unsure Why General Killed Amhara Region President,” 25 June 2019 — https://www.voanews.com/a/analysts-unsure-why-general-killed-amhara-region-governor/4972894.html
8. BBC, “Ethiopia army chief shot dead in ‘coup bid’ attacks,” 23 June 2019 — https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-48734572
9. Ethiopia Observer, “A coup plot in Bahir Dar? What we know now,” 22 June 2019 — https://www.ethiopiaobserver.com/2019/06/22/a-coup-plot-in-bahir-dar-what-we-know-now/
10. Ezega, “Gedu Andargachew Resigns; Ambachew Mekonnen Elected Chief Administrator of Amhara Region,” 8 March 2019 — https://www.ezega.com/News/NewsDetails/6991/Gedu-Andargachew-Resigns-Ambachew-Mekonnen-Elected-Chief-Administrator-of-Amhara-Region
11. Foreign Policy, “What’s Behind the Coup Attempt in Ethiopia?” (interview with Felix Horne, HRW), 24 June 2019
12. The Conversation, “Ethiopia’s civil war: what’s behind the Amhara rebellion?”, 7 November 2025 — https://theconversation.com/ethiopias-civil-war-whats-behind-the-amhara-rebellion-252425

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End of expanded article for Dispatch 4. One article, approximately 3,000 words.