(Reuters) – A border clash between Ethiopian and Kenyan fishermen has left about 22 Kenyans missing and 13 people dead on the Ethiopian side, authorities from the two countries said.
The fighting happened on Saturday evening at Lopeimukat and Natira near the Omo River along the Kenya-Ethiopia border, Kenya’s Turkana county governor Jeremiah Lomorukai said in a statement.
Around 22 Kenyan fishermen were unaccounted for, and 15 boats were stolen, while six ethnic Dasenech fishermen from Ethiopia had been rescued and returned to their country, Turkana county police said on Sunday.
On the Ethiopian side, a total of 13 people died and another three were wounded in the fighting, Tadele Hatte, the chief administrator of Dasenech district, said in a statement on Monday.
Kenya’s Interior Minister Kipchumba Murkomen wrote on X on Sunday that the government had deployed additional security to the border and that he was engaging with Addis Ababa to “broker peace between the two communities”.
(Reporting by Humphrey Malalo in Nairobi and Dawit Endeshaw in Addis Ababa; Writing by Hereward Holland; Editing by George Obulutsa, Ros Russell and Aidan Lewis)
