Ethiopia releases Eritrean POWs

The Ethiopian defence ministry announced on Wednesday that it would release, "for health reasons", 23 more Eritrean POWs captured during the two-year border war. A spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, told IRIN on Thursday that the POWs had already been released, and said the ICRC was coordinating their repatriation. The spokesman told IRIN that since the signing of the Algiers peace accord last December, and including the 23 released on Wednesday, Ethiopia had released a total of 879 of the 2,600 Eritrean POWs it was holding when the war ended. The Ethiopian move comes a few weeks after the United Nations Mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea (UNMEE), the body appointed to monitor the cessation of hostilities, called on both sides to accelerate the repatriation of POWs. Ethiopia had earlier put its release programme on hold until it received word from the Eritrean authorities on the fate of a celebrated Ethiopian air force pilot, Col Bezabeh Petros, who went missing after his plane was shot down over the Eritrean capital, Asmara, in June 1998, just days after the war began. Eritrea, for its part, had so far released 653 of the 1,000 Ethiopian POWs it was holding, the ICRC spokesman said.