Despite a consistent position that there will be no statements given by the Ethiopian side regarding the investigations into the causes of the crash of ET-409 off the coast of Lebanon, one thing though has been made clear by officials here - that nothing has yet been ruled out—including sabotage.

An investigation by The Reporter has revealed that in addition to breaching the “gag agreement’ between high officials of both countries, the Lebanese side has also been committing a series of deliberate tampering of evidence, withholding of information and preventing access to Ethiopian investigation teams sent to Beirut.

A 13-member Ethiopian team, comprising senior pilots, medical personnel and other professionals, went to Beirut on January 26.

Reliable sources have disclosed to The Reporter that the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) was tampered with by the Lebanese. The professionals that went to inspect the CVR are said to have found that recorded segment of several minutes was deleted.

A USD 30 billion worth Memorandum Of Understanding (MoU) for a fiveyear food security program was signed on Wednesday between the Government of Ethiopia and nine donor agencies.

The renewed Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP) and Household Asset Building Program (HABP) are expected to run from 2010 to 2014. The first phase of the programs was carried out from 2005 to 2009, covering the food security needs of more than 7.5 million people.

State Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Mitiku Kassa, told The Reporter that the PSNP would provide an annual support to some 7.8 million people. Mitiku attributed the increase in the number of people that receive the support to the program’s new expansion plan in the Afar and Somali regions - predominantly pastoralist and chronically food-insecure areas of the country.

Government records show that some 6 million people (1,315,102 households) have benefitted from credits financed by the government’s federal food security budget, while about 359,745 received credits through donor-financed food security projects.

Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi said on Tuesday at a UNESCO conference held at the UNECA here that he was confident that Ethiopia will meet the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) in education.


Meles said that his government has been concertedly addressing the problem of education over the past decades and that the primary enrollment in the country has reached 95 percent.

Experts, however, are saying that a lot remains to achieve the Education For All (EFA) goals in Africa, which were adopted in 2000 at the World Education Forum in Dakar. EFA has six goals, of which only two are included in the MDG in education. For education to bring meaningful change to, all the six goals of the EFA are cricial, experts argue.

All the same, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Culture Organization is deeply worried that the global financial crisis is threatening to set back education worldwide.

The federal court has over the first six months of the current Ethiopian fiscal year frozen land worth over 500 million birr in Addis Ababa illegally transferred to individuals in the aftermath of the May 2005 disputed election, it was learnt.

The court took the move after the Federal Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (FEACC) investigated the case and filed corruption charges against the allegedly illegally transferred properties for most of which the concerned authorities had issued title deeds.

The transfer fraud involves a total of 204764 sq.m. plots of land in the metropolis, of which 176, 610sq.m. is estimated to be worth over half a billion birr, according to the Federal Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission’s (FEACC) latest report obtained by The Reporter.

The Commission has investigated thirteen cases associated with the alleged crime where 52 suspects are currently under police custody in connection with the reported scandal, the report indicated.