ETHIOPIA: Death sentence to Ethiopia bombers

An Ethiopian court has sentenced 5 members of a Somali Islamic group to be publicly hanged for killing 27 civilians in bomb attacks during the mid-1990s.

 5 others were jailed for between 5 and 25 years for blowing up restaurants, railway lines and other targets, the state-run Ethiopian News Agency (ENA) reported on Friday.

 he convicts were sentenced to death by hanging after they were found guilty of killing 27 innocent civilians, including a Dutch citizen...and inflicting injuries on 16 others," ENA quoted the court as saying at Thursday's hearing, which was closed to the media.

 The 10 were accused of belonging to the al-Itihad al-Islamiya group, which claimed responsibility for the attacks at the time they were carried out in 1995 and 1996 in the capital Addis Ababa and elsewhere in the country.

 "They were also found guilty of accepting willingly al-Itihad's plan to depose the government through terrorism and attending military training to execute the evil intentions of the outlawed group," the court added.

 ENA carried a report of the same trial last week saying that the court had convicted 8 alleged members of al-Itihad for killing 36 civilians. There was no immediate explanation for the discrepancy in the number of convicts and victims.

 The court granted the 10 the right to appeal, ENA said.

 Al-Itihad first came to prominence in the early 1990s as a military group aiming to create a unified Islamic state in Somalia and an ethnic Somali region in neighbouring Ethiopia.

 United Nations humanitarian workers and Somali experts say al-Itihad has since renounced violence and now runs educational and welfare programmes in Somalia, a country riven by fighting between clan-based warlords.

 Ethiopia, which launched a military strike against al-Itihad in Somalia in 1996, accuses Somalia's transitional government of sheltering the group, saying al-Itihad has links to the al Qaeda network of Osama bin Laden.

 The United States placed al-Itihad on a list of "terrorist" organisations after the September 11 attacks due to suspected al Qaeda links and says it is seeking more information on possible militant groups in Somalia.