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Bekele’s sister is one of dozens of students from Ethiopia’s Debark University who have been missing for a week now – she got on a bus to go home at the end of the academic year, but never reached her destination.

No-one in the family had been able to make contact with her, so when his mobile phone lit up, telling Bekele he had an incoming call from his sister, he swiftly pressed accept. The names of the people the BBC spoke to for this article have been changed for safety reasons.

He was greeted by the voice he had longed to hear, but then an unfamiliar man’s voice came on, telling him that if he ever wanted to see his sister again, he needed to cough up 700,000 Ethiopian birr ($12,000; £9,400).

Dozens of bus passengers, mostly students, were kidnapped by gunmen last Wednesday.

Some managed to escape – and three of those who successfully broke away told the BBC they believe more than 100 people are still being held.

The kidnappers rang Bekele three times, demanding the 700,000 birr ransom.

Bekele fears the worst – he says that as a day labourer he can’t even afford to pay the captors 7,000 birr.

He is far from alone – in recent years, Ethiopia has seen a dramatic surge in kidnapping-for-ransom.

Oromia, Ethiopia’s largest region which surrounds the capital Addis Ababa, is worst affected.

The security forces have been stretched thin in an effort to contain numerous conflicts that have broken out in Africa’s second most populous state, and it has led to increasing lawlessness.

The people kidnapped last Wednesday were travelling in three buses, making their way to Addis Ababa from Debark University in the Simien Mountains, a well-known tourist destination.

The vehicles came to an unexpected halt near Garba Guracha, a small town in Oromia.

“There were gunshots and I heard repeated orders to run. I didn’t even know what we were doing,” Mehret, an animal science student travelling on one of the buses told the BBC.

Law student Petros added: “They told everyone to get off. They started beating everyone [with sticks] and forced us to run to the woods close by. It was terrifying.”

The gunmen forced their captives on a journey to a remote rural area where the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) rebel group is believed to operate.

The OLA says it is fighting for the “self-determination” of the Oromo ethnic group, Ethiopia’s biggest, but it has been classified as a terrorist organisation by the federal parliament.

Mehret and Petros have said the OLA was behind their abduction, but the rebel group has not commented.

OLA spokesman Odaa Tarbii has previously denied to local media that it carries out abductions to finance its operations, saying a weak federal government has allowed criminality to flourish.

After being forced to run and walk for around two kilometres (1.2 miles), Mehret, Petros and some other abductees managed to escape.

The gunmen were struggling to control the large group “so some of us hid under the bushes and waited until they went far”, Petros said.

One student, who is still being held by the gunmen, managed to sneak a phone call to her family. She told them she had witnessed her captors killing some of the other students.

“She has given up on life now,” a relative told the BBC. “She doesn’t think even paying ransom would win freedom.”

The mass abduction has similarities to other abductions. Just over a year ago, more than 50 passengers travelling from the Amhara region to Addis Ababa were kidnapped.

A local official said those who were able to pay a ransom were released, but did not specify what happened to those who could not.

In another high-profile case, 18 university students in Oromia were said to have been kidnapped by armed attackers in late 2019. They have not been found until this day.

The government faced fierce criticism for failing to secure their release and find the perpetrators.

A few months after the students went missing, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed told lawmakers that the kidnappers were “unknown people” and that there was no evidence “to say something bad happened” to the students.

Although Oromia is a hotspot for abductions, kidnappers also operate elsewhere, such as the war-scarred regions of Tigray and Amhara.

In March, kidnappers in Tigray captured a 16-year-old schoolgirl and demanded her parents pay a ransom of three million birr. The family reported the abduction to the police, but the schoolgirl’s dead body was found in June, leading to a national outcry.

The hundreds of abductees across Ethiopia often endure cruel treatment, including torture, the state-affiliated Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (EHRC) says.

The government has not yet commented on last Wednesday’s abduction and officials have not responded to BBC requests for comment.

Some of the abductees’ relatives have accused the authorities of not giving the incident enough attention.

“It is confusing why the authorities are neglecting the issue while our children have been taken away,” said Dalke, a farmer whose daughter was kidnapped.

Another father said they just wanted their loved ones back.

“We don’t have any money to offer [the kidnappers]. I sacrificed a lot to send my children to school… now all we do is cry and pray,” he said.

A town at the heart of mining coltan, a key ingredient in making mobile phones, has been seized in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo by rebel forces, their spokesman has said.

Rubaya fell into the hands of M23 fighters on Tuesday following heavy clashes with government troops, Willy Ngoma said.

The government has not yet commented, but a civil society activist confirmed that M23 had captured the strategic town.

It happened on the day France’s President Emmanuel Macron called on neighbouring Rwanda to “halt its support” for the M23 rebel group.

Mr Macron made his comments after holding talks with DR Congo’s President Félix Tshisekedi in France’s capital, Paris.

Rwanda has repeatedly denied backing the rebels, who have captured much territory in the mineral-rich east during fighting over the past 18 months.

DR Congo is the world’s second-biggest producer of coltan, with most of it coming from the mines around Rubaya in the Masisi district.

Coltan is used to make batteries for electric vehicles and mobile phones.

DR Congo’s government accuses Rwanda of backing the rebels to steal its mineral wealth, an allegation the government in Kigali denies.

Mr Ngoma told the BBC that M23 had seized Rubaya “not because of its richness, but to chase away our enemy”.

A civil society activist in Masisi, Voltaire Sadiki, said the rebels had “ordered civilians with guns to hand them [in] and continue with their lives”.

The rebels, initially Congolese army deserters, accuse the government of marginalising the country’s ethnic Tutsi minority and refusing to negotiate with them. They regard the verdant hills around Masisi as their true homeland.

Mr Tshisekedi says the rebels are a front for what he calls the “expansionist aims” of Rwanda, which it denies.

Colombia’s EMC rebel group has announced it will stop kidnapping people for ransom.

The EMC is the largest offshoot of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) and is made up of rebels who refused to lay down their arms when the Farc signed a peace deal in 2016.

The announcement is a boost for the government of Gustavo Petro, which is engaged in peace talks with the EMC.

Ransom kidnappings have been on the rise in Colombia this year.

Among those seized – and later released – was the father of Liverpool footballer Luis Díaz.

The kidnapping of Mr Díaz Snr and his wife from their home town of Barrancas, in northern Colombia, shone a spotlight on the practice, which several criminal and rebel groups engage in to raise money.

While Tuesday’s announcement by the EMC is a victory for President Petro, who says he aims to achieve “total peace” in Colombia, kidnappings for ransom are likely to continue.

The National Liberation Army (ELN), the rebel group which seized Luis Díaz’s parents, is one of several criminal and rebel groups active in Colombia which have so far refused to stop abducting people for money.

The Ombudsman’s office said this week that 91 people were still being held hostage across the country.

According to a report released by Colombia’s Foundation for Peace and Reconciliation, the number of people kidnapped in the first 10 months of this year was the highest since 2016 – the year when the government signed a peace deal with the Farc.

The EMC – full name Estado Mayor Central (Spanish for Central General Command) – is the largest of the dissident rebel groups to have formed after the 2016 peace deal and has an estimated 3,000 members.

It is most active in the provinces of Caquetá, Guaviare, Meta and Putumayo.

Negotiations with the EMC have been rocky. In May, President Petro suspended a ceasefire with the rebel group after it had killed four indigenous teenagers who had tried to flee after being forcibly recruited by the group.

And it was not until last month that the two sides resumed peace talks.

The United States issued a warning to Yemen’s Iranian-backed Houthi rebels to drop a series of trumped-up charges against members of the country’s Baha’i community

Sam Brownback, the US Ambassador for International Religious Freedoms, expressed concern about reports that a court in the Houthi-controlled capital Sanaa is summoning members of the Baha’i faith to stand trial on charges of apostasy and espionage.

“We urge them to drop these allegations, release those arbitrarily detained, and respect religious freedom for all,” Brownback wrote on Twitter.

The international Baha’i community has denounced the court cases as “religiously-motivated sham trials” and accused the Houthi court of prosecuting the Baha’i community under “directives from the Iranian authorities.”

“The Baha’is that are held in Sanaa are innocent and the physical and mental torture they are experiencing is designed to force them to admit to crimes they have not committed,” Bani Dugal, the principal representative of the Baha’i International Community, said in a statement.

The mainly Shiite Houthis are financed, trained, and armed by the Islamic Republic of Iran, which restricts the rights of Baha’is, despite the fact that it allows freedom of religion for Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians in Iran.

Dozens of Baha’i leaders and followers have been arrested and imprisoned by the Houthi movement in recent years, according to religious discrimination advocacy groups.

The current estimates indicate that several thousand Baha’is still live in Yemen despite years of civil war and instability in the country. Hamed bin Haydara, the head of a Baha’i group in Yemen was sentenced to death in 2018 for the same charges of espionage and apostasy.

The international Baha’i community said he was arrested in 2013 and later beaten and tortured. Haydara was later forced to sign, while blindfolded, documents that admitted his guilt.

 

South Sudan rebels rejected the government’s peace offer to reduce the number of states and create three administrative areas in the country, aiming to pave the way for a unity government.

The country’s president Salva Kiir had said he would compromise by cutting the current 32 regional states back down to the original 10, which is one of the major demands of the rebels. The number of states is controversial because the borders will determine the divisions of power in the country.

However, Kiir also included three “administrative areas” of Pibor, Ruweng and Abyei. Rebel chief Riek Machar said he opposed the idea of three areas, saying it “cannot be referred to as reverting to 10 states” and “as such cannot be accepted”: “We therefore call upon President Kiir to reconsider this idea of creating administrative areas”, Machar said.

Kiir said returning to a system of 10 states was a “painful decision but a necessary one if that is what brings peace”. The most controversial of the three proposed areas is the oil-rich Ruweng, in the north.

Kiir and Machar agreed on a peace deal in 2018. However, they now face international pressure, including by the United States, to resolve their differences before a deadline set till 22 February.