University president, Professor Endrias Eshete, said in a statement broadcast on state television, that one of the students died on Friday. Three others with serious injuries are receiving treatment at Addis Ababa’s Menelik Hospital.
The dead student was identified as Gezmu Shiferaw, who was in his second year of an Arts and Science degree. His remains were taken by car Friday afternoon for burial in his hometown in the Tigrary Region in northern Ethiopia.
The three seriously injured students were identified as Abate Abegaz, Mola Reda and Gebregzi Kalaya.
‘It was a dismal, cowardly and premeditated act’
The deceased was one of four students seriously injured when a hand grenade was hurled through a window into a dormitory lounge which was crowded with people watching the early evening television news.
Endrias said nine students sustained injuries in the explosion, four of them seriously, while the rest had been discharged after treatment for light shrapnel wounds and cuts.
The university president described the incident as “an attempt to sow ethnic discord among the student body of the University”.
“It was a dismal, cowardly and premeditated act,” Endrias said.
He promised the university’s security staff would step up protection measures.
Police said they were continuing to search for an unidentified lone person reportedly seen running out of the dormitory building where the bomb exploded.
Police initially indicated that activists of the separatist Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) may have had a hand in the grenade attack at the university, as they had been involved in inciting and agitating students in secondary schools and colleges throughout Ethiopia in recent weeks. – Sapa-dpa
