ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia—According to his wife, the late Gen. Seare Mekonnen, Ethiopia’s former army chief of staff, was assassinated by a bodyguard shortly after 9 p.m. on June 22, 2019. The general was rushed to a hospital, where he later died. His companion, a retired general who was also hit, died immediately. His wife was inside their home at the exact moment of the killing, but she was there at the scene when, a few minutes later, the bodyguard sprang from the ground and ran to a shed at the end of the garden, firing a volley of bullets at a security guard in pursuit.
If anybody knows what happened to the widely respected general that night, it is his widow, Tsige Alemayehu. But, for more than a year after the assassination, she was not asked to testify in the accused bodyguard’s trial. Nor were she and her family allowed to attend the hearing. Indeed, before June she had never met the prosecutor hired by the government in the case. Her efforts to speak with the attorney general, the federal police commissioner, and even Ethiopia’s prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, were all rebuffed. “We don’t know what is going on and nobody is telling us,” she said in an interview in July. “There must be something they want to hide.”
