Old photo shows Kenyan massacre victims, not Ethiopians killed by government soldiers

The post was published on Facebook on May 31, 2023, and has been shared more than 200 times.

Written in Amharic, it translates to: "They massacred the monastery’s monks like this. Will Gojjam people live in peace after experiencing this? Will you feed and help these troops traversing your cities for more attacks? I’m pissed off."

Gojjam is a province in Ethiopia's Amhara region.

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Screenshot showing the false post, taken on June 7, 2023

The image shows several dead bodies covered in blankets on rocky ground and soldiers with a military truck combing the site.

Monastery massacre

The monastery mention in the post refers to reports of a government-led assault on a rural church purported to have been the base of an armed rebel group.

Various accounts of the alleged battle in early June 2023 claimed that up to 600 people were either killed, injured or dispersed.

The church in question is said to be located in the Debre Elias district of the East Gojjam zone in Amhara.

Images published on government social media accounts (here and here) show a small building in a hilly, wooded area. A few pictures show weapons and dugouts on the property, as well as a group of about a dozen captives wearing civilian clothing.

To date, there have been no verified pictures of the victims of the reported siege that apparently included the use of "heavy weapons".

The picture of bodies in blankets lying on the ground is unrelated to Ethiopia.

Photo from Kenya

Using a reverse image search, AFP Fact Check found that the photo has been online for nearly a decade.

It shows the bodies of victims of an attack in December 2014 on quarry workers near Mandera — a town in northern Kenya on the country’s border with Somalia.

The photo, which has been published in articles by the BBC (archived here) and France24 (archived here), is credited to AFP.

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Image from the AFP website showing the bodies of Kenyans attacked by Islamist extremists at a quarry in Mandera

On December 2, 2014, militants from the Somalia-based Al Shabab rebels killed 36 quarry workers in Kenya.

Kenya has suffered several reprisal attacks by the Islamist group since the militants invaded Somalia in 2011. Kenyan forces are part of the African Union troops (archived here) battling Al Shabab in Somalia.