Dear Ethiopians:
When comparing the air raids today, I am proud of the way in which our pilots carried out their mission professionally and accurately at great risk to themselves.
Low altitude, precision bombing of an airfield is one of the most dangerous aerial missions possible. Our pilots scored direct hits on the Asmara runway and the military airfield hangars. They were able to avoid civilian casualities by flying low into the teeth of the Eritrean air defenses.
This is courageous flying. The pilot who performed this mission is a HERO.
Eritrean EPLF Followers:
Hang your heads in shame at what your cowardly pilots did. Bombing undefended residential areas with the purpose of killing civilians is regarded with universal contempt and disgust among combat pilots the world over. Those who planned and participated in this deliberate attack are going to face justice someday.
- Dagmawi
***********************************************************************MEKELE, Ethiopia, June 5 (Reuters) - A five-year-old girl lay dead staring up at the trees on the rough patch of ground where she had been playing 10 minutes earlier.
In a sack-coloured dress, she was camouflaged against the dusty earth and went unseen in the mayhem that followed the twilight bombing of the northern Ethiopian town of Mekele by Eritrean warplanes.
Pick-ups and old cars screamed up the road and the dead and barely living were dumped together on back seats and flatbeds of trucks.
Finally the girl was spotted and women wailed and beat their foreheads as she was thrown in with the rest, her broken bones jutting out from the tattered bloody skin on her legs.
The Eritrean bomber that killed her had dropped its deadly load from high above the normally-sleepy town just after 6 p.m. (1500 GMT), striking a wide stony street close to the town centre and lined with tiny tin-roofed houses on one side and waste ground on the other.
Eritrea said it bombed the town in retaliation for an Ethiopian air attack on its capital earlier in the day. Ethiopia said that its attack was revenge for an earlier Eritrean raid.
At least 10 bodies were strewn on the Mekele road -- stopped in their tracks on the way home from work and school -- with blood seeping out of burning shrapnel wounds on their legs, stomachs and faces.
An hour later it was dark and at least 30 bodies were laid out uncovered on grass behind the town's only hospital and on the white slab floor of its small morgue, where a tap dripped over the corpses.
Among them were 10 children including two tiny babies, and others with missing feet, arms and faces.
Over 70 wounded, many of them unattended children, lay on benches and on the stone floor of the hospital verandah looking listless with bloody open gashes.
Nurses stood over the worst, holding drips as their injuries were roughly patched. Those considered a priority were carried off inside on blood-soiled stretchers.
``What do you think of this?'' said one nurse weeping as she held a drip over an elderly man. ``Why has this happened to us?''
The question was directed at no one in particular but could only be answered by leaders in Asmara and Addis Ababa -- leaders who fought side-by-side in a 30-year guerrilla war against the Ethiopian Marxist regime of Mariam Haile Mengistu, but fell out last month over a rocky triangle of land on their border.
A casually-dressed policeman arrived on the scene and began to shout into his walkie-talkie, but other officials were nowhere to be seen.
``I think we are managing,'' said the hospital administrator as he weaved through the injured, meticulously taking names.
The town's new hospital, still under construction, was bombed earlier in the day.
Relatives stood waiting in groups in the darkness -- many of the men with assault rifles slung over their shoulders.
``The place (where they bombed) is a civilian area,'' said one man. ``There is an elementary school there. The eldest children are 13 or 14. They were just playing and running, it was the end of the day.''
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.