Malawi Police round up 148 fleeing Ethiopian refugees

Blantyre, Malawi - Police in the central Malawi mountainous district of Dedza have rounded up 148 Ethiopians who had fled from a United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)/Malawi government designated refugee camp, police said here Wednesday.

"Police caught the Ethiopians as they were hiding in a hill," said police spokes man Flanklin Gausi.

Gausi told PANA the Ethiopians, who included women and children, had hiked and walked the 200 kilometres from the Dzaleka Refugee Camp in the central district of Dowa.

He said during interrogation the Ethiopians said they wanted to flee to Zimbabwe through Mozambique.

"They said they were running away from problems at the camp," he said.

Dedza lies on the porous Malawi/Mozambique border.

"People in the Linthipe area tipped us after noticing the strange people in Lint hipe Hill who were talking in an incomprehensible tongue," he said.

Gausi said the Ethiopians fled Dzaleka Monday.

Police rounded them up in the hill and took them to the immigration office in the district which has since returned them to Dzaleka Refugee Camp.

There are about 10,000 refugees and asylum seekers in Malawi mainly from the Great Lakes region of Rwanda, Burundi and the DR Congo as well as Somalia, Uganda, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sierra Leone and Liberia.

At the peak of Mozambique's 16-year civil war that ended in 1992, Malawi hosted over 1 million Mozambican refugees some of whom have settled and married or got married in Malawi.