The Tigray Regional State Supreme Court has publicly defended the acquittal of two men previously convicted of the 2023 killing of Zewdu Haftu, insisting the retrial followed the instructions of its own Cassation Bench — even as a widening coalition of civic and gender-justice organizations demands an immediate appeal and warns that the reversal was reached without the case's central evidence ever being examined.
In a statement issued August 12 through its Communication Directorate, the court said the Mekelle City High Court re-examined the case on remand, heard both parties and witnesses, and acquitted the two defendants on August 5. The Cassation Bench, the statement said, had "found points that required further review" when it overturned the earlier convictions and sent the case back down.
The defendants, Yared Gebreslase Belay and Angesom Hailemaryiam, were convicted in July 2025 of killing Zewdu Haftu, a 32-year-old woman who was dragged and fatally crushed under a vehicle in Mekelle in August 2023 after resisting an attempted sexual assault. The killing, carried out in daylight, became one of the most closely watched tests of Tigray's postwar justice system and a rallying point for accountability on gender-based violence in the region. The convictions were upheld by the Supreme Court's Criminal Bench before the Cassation Bench reversed them.
The Supreme Court characterized the retrial as an independent and impartial re-investigation that produced the verdict the lower court deemed just. It did not specify what evidence led to the acquittal.
That omission sits at the center of the backlash. A coalition of nine Tigrayan civic and gender-justice organizations said in an August 12 statement that the acquittal of the two men is "killing her twice," and demanded an immediate appeal. The groups' core contention is procedural: the Cassation Bench had specifically ordered that the original digital evidence held by the National Intelligence and Security Service be produced, verified, and explained to the court by a qualified expert — and that order, they say, was never executed. According to the coalition, authorities instead sought to substitute a Tigray-based expert, and on July 27 a police officer offered clarification on written evidence in place of the ordered expert testimony. Nine days later, the court acquitted.
Reporting by the Tigray-based outlet Wegahta, citing sources familiar with the proceedings, offers a picture of what went missing: digital evidence from the original investigation indicating that SIM cards belonging to the defendants had been used in a phone belonging to Zewdu. When the court ordered the material resubmitted, police reported they were unable to retrieve it from federal police custody.
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The case has long carried allegations of a conflict of interest. Yared is reported to be the son of Tigray Police Deputy Commissioner Colonel Gebreselassie Belay, and the nine-group coalition alleges the colonel invoked his position to intimidate an investigator on the case as early as May 2024. A surviving eyewitness, Semhal, was previously reported to have been removed from hospital care and detained for eight months without charge. The coalition is now calling for written protection guarantees for Semhal, for Zewdu's sister Birtukan Haftu, and for the judges, prosecutors, and investigators who handled the case — arguing that proximity to authority must not function as a defense in law.
The Supreme Court, for its part, directed much of its statement at the public reaction rather than the evidentiary questions. It criticized what it described as the misuse of social media to attack judicial institutions in place of formal legal remedies, said such campaigns place undue pressure on appellate courts, and noted that anyone dissatisfied with the ruling may appeal through the legally prescribed process. Cases, it added, can proceed through the regional system up to the Cassation Bench and, where applicable, the Tigray Constitutional Interpretation Commission. The court said it will issue a formal statement to the media once the case reaches final resolution.
For now, the gap between the two accounts defines the story: a court asserting that process was followed, and a civic movement asserting that the process's most important instruction never was.
With reporting from Addis Standard, Wegahta, and civic coalition statements. ◆
