#When the internet disconnected. Everyone just. Dropped dead on the streets. With no one to reconnect back to it and save them.

[cheezyharu]

In light of recent p:r stuff, here’s someone I’ve been meaning to do for a while, they’re literally just a sobbing wet cat

[ratmonky]

Tangible Phantom

Word Count: 3.2K

Warnings: non-con, invisible smexy time, stalking, breeding, mild gore

AO3 Link

The internet was a magnificent invention of humankind. It made everything easier. At the same time, it was accessible to almost anyone and it brought people together.

There were so many things one could find by typing some letters on a browser and with a click of a mouse.

Whether it be cute animal videos you could share with your friends, porn to watch late at night as your fingers slid inside your panties beneath the sheets, or disturbing images of people who had or were taking their last breath. You could find it all on the internet.

Morbid curiosity led you to the furthest parts of the internet like on strange websites where you could find pictures of deformed bodies.

There wasn’t any explanation on why they had been deformed like that but their death cause was all the same, heart failure.

Although you weren’t anything more than a normal citizen, you felt like what you were doing was wrong. Looking at those images and scrolling down to see more of the distorted faces of what used to be people who had a family, a life, and goals that you would never know about should have been enough to make you click away. Yet, you always found yourself logging into your laptop every night to check if there were more.

It wasn’t illegal nor it was hurting anyone. It was just… unethical. Somewhat felt like you were feeling guilty of what happened even though you had nothing to do with any of these people.

Nevertheless, it made you wonder if you would feel the same way if those people were someone you knew. Or if it were you.

Pfft.

As if that would ever happen.

~~~

It was a late night when you were walking the same route to your place with your mind clouded by what to eat once you got home. The streets were rather silent at this time of the night, no cars passed or a single soul was outside, so the only noise was your footsteps that echoed in the empty street.

Although you were only about a full two minutes away from arriving at your place, you suddenly stopped in shock when you saw a dark figure sitting in the dark under the bridge you had to walk through.

Alone at night, standing stiffly in the dark, looking desperately down at your phone screen and then to the man, you considered turning back and walking to the nearest bus station. You could stay at your friend’s place again rather than take your chance to walk past someone who looked like a predator waiting for its prey.

You considered calling one of your friends and being on the phone with them until you arrived home. Decidedly, you called your friend’s phone but they didn’t answer. If it was them calling you, you would answer right away, they knew how you didn’t call anyone without a reason.

While the phone was ringing again, you kept muttering under your breath about how much you were going to yell at them once they answered you but they never picked up.

Your other friend wasn’t in town and you could never call your friend to ask if her brother could escort you to your place again, you only made everyone question your sanity when you asked for favors like that.

You made everyone around you uncomfortable, they think you were out of your mind. Why were you so scared of walking past a possibly homeless man?

This was why most of your friends hated you, this was why they didn’t answer your calls anymore.

Huffing in annoyance and disappointment, you put your phone against your ear to pretend to be on the phone with your father as you started walking again.

The man noticed you, you saw his head moving when the sound of your footsteps alarmed him of your presence, all of his attention was on you now.

You tried ignoring the instincts that told you to turn back and run away.

It was probably just a homeless man.

There was no way that he would try to do anything to you.

You were just overreacting like you always did.

You refused to acknowledge the man’s existence as you increased your speed to pass him as soon as possible and go on with your night like you weren’t already having a panic attack.

The man was doing nothing but watching you intently, he hadn’t moved.

Yeah, you were just overreacting before.

“Yes, I’ll be home soon, dad! I’m walking!” you started basically yelling, hoping that your acting was believable.

Maybe not.

The man got up, blocking your path.

Startled, your hand gripped tighter on your purse and you started yelling to your phone. “Dad! Can you come outside the building and wait for me?! I’m right around the corner once I pass the bridge!”

You were scared to look at the man. As if you didn’t notice him getting up, you ignored his presence and tried to walk around him but he stepped to the side to block your way again.

This time, your lips started trembling in fear, you actually were believing you were talking to your father. “Dad, I’m scared, please come get me!”

“I can see that you’re not on the phone,” a husky voice said. “Your phone screen is lit up.”

You shrieked upon him talking to you. When his hand reached for your face, you jerked away and took a couple of steps back.

“Don’t touch me!” you screamed, your eyes finally meeting his eyes that were sparkling with vicious intent. “I’ll call the police!”

Ignoring your threat, he took a step closer towards you which only made you panic more.

You looked for an exit. To your right was a concrete wall and to your left was the large sewer gate. Running past the man was impossible.

“Stay away from me!” You turned on your heels to make a bolt towards the sewers but the man was faster than you. He grabbed you by your hair and pulled your back flush against his chest.

You started to scream as you struggled in the man’s hold. It was barely midnight, someone would hear your screams for help.

Normally an attacker would chicken out if their victim was struggling and screaming this much but your attacker seemed to not have a care in the world if he would get caught or not.

As he started dragging you towards the sewer gate, you shook your body violently, kicking helplessly in the air and yelling on top of your lungs.

He started shushing you and clapped a hand over your mouth to keep you quiet while proceeded to drag you further inside the sewers.

This was the end, wasn’t it?

~~~

On a regular night, Mahito usually read his book to the sounds of the rats or the water splashing sounds in the sewers. The steady and faint noises were enough to lull him to sleep but tonight his peace was disturbed.

A woman was screaming for her life. Something he heard more often than regular since it was usually him who was the cause of their screams. This woman’s screams were echoing in the sewers, being muffled by something as a man’s voice kept shushing.

Out of curiosity, he put his book down and walked to the source of the loud noises.

It took him barely a minute to find you and your attacker. The man had you under him, his chest pressing on your back as he was hastily pulling his pants down.

“Oh, how amusing,” Mahito chuckled, getting closer to watch your face stained with tears.

He crouched right next to your face, humming cutely. “You’re quite adorable,” he said, his hand reached to tuck a strand of hair behind your ear. “Really my type.”

“Help!”

Your sudden yell made Mahito pull his hand back. Whew, you had startled him.

“Nobody will hear you,” the man assured with a breathy laugh, his hand rubbing guiding his cock between your thighs.

Mahito pouted his lips and tilted his head to the side. “It’s no fun when I’m left out, you know.”

The man was busy pulling your panties to the side.

“Please, please, please don’t!”

“Don’t ignore me,” Mahito furrowed his brows and tapped on the man’s shoulder.

You were still struggling under the man’s weight when he suddenly stopped moving. With a burst of an adrenaline rush, you pushed yourself up from the concrete and threw your attacker tumbling back.

Almost immediately you got up on your feet and swung your purse at the man, hitting him in the face with your eyes closed shut in fear.

The impact made a splash sound as if you had hit something soggy. What? Your eyes hesitantly opened and it took you a long moment to register what you were seeing.

“Wow.” Mahito stood beside you with a smile on his face. “He looks nice like that, don’t you think?”

You dropped your purse.

Your mouth opened to scream but what were you going to gain from it? You closed it back again.

It looked unreal, nothing like the photos you had seen online. You wanted to look away but you couldn’t.

“Heeeeyyyy~” Mahito stood in front of you, waving a hand to your face. “I don’t even get thanks?”

The man’s disfigured body and face were covered in blood. The sight was enough to cause trauma and make any normal person collapse on their knees, heaving. His body was twisted to the point you couldn’t tell if he was a human or not.

What you were seeing wasn’t human.

You couldn’t tell if it was a human.

Your brain disconnected it from your mind that he was a real, living, and breathing person only a couple of seconds ago.

The fact that you couldn’t even process what you were seeing right in front of you made you burst into a peal of hysterical laughter.

Mahito took a step back. “Ah, you’re one of those who goes insane…” He shrugged, watching you lose your sanity was fun too. His eyes landed on the panties which were halfway down on your thighs that you hadn’t even bothered to pull up and then his stare landed on your unevenly hoisted skirt. A grin spread on his face.

Your laughter died down quickly and sobbing replaced it. You couldn’t stop your tears. Your vision was getting blurry from your tears and you tried to revive your brain to think of what to do next.

Could you just leave this man here?

Even though he attacked you with full intention to rape you, it… it was wrong to leave him like this.

He was dead. Disfigured. Not human.

There was nothing you could do. Whatever caused this man to turn into this inhuman thing could have happened to you.

You felt a shiver run down your spine and up your shoulders. As if the cool evening breeze had hands, the chilly air caressed your skin.

A quiet sob left your lips and you lifted your hand to wipe your tears but stopped when something firm pressed on your back.

“You’re definitely my type,” Mahito snickered, pulling his hand back.

With a shriek you jumped forward, whipping your head around to look behind you. There was nothing.

You had to be going insane.

You put a hand against your forehead and looked around the sewers. The most logical thing to do was to leave. This rapist deserved to rot here, you didn’t care. You wouldn’t care. You knew you couldn’t care less.

“Heeey~~ I’m Mahito, your savior.” He poked your nose and you itched where he had touched you. “You should thank me for saving youuuu!”

Once you got home to your bed, you would browse on the websites to stare at disfigured humans like him. This was nothing. You had seen worse on the internet. You didn’t care.

Mahito crouched down to open your purse. He looked around your stuff and tried to find something that had your name on it but it was futile.

You weren’t going to wake up tomorrow and think about its face.

“Hey, what’s your name?” he asked.

No, you weren’t going to remember about this thing the day after tomorrow.

“Hellloooo~~ What’s your name?”

Definitely, you weren’t going to think about this thing whenever you closed your eyes.

“What’s your name?” Mahito put his hand on your shoulder. You reacted to his touch and flinched but didn’t answer him. “Ugh! This is the third time I’m asking, sweetheart.”

You were being paranoid, that was for sure.

It felt like ghostly hands were touching you.

“Let’s see how far we can go before you see me.” Mahito grabbed you by your shoulders and pushed you down.

Fear came rushing back and you started screaming. Something you couldn’t see had tackled you on the cold concrete. This wasn’t a figment of your imagination, this was real.

“You know, a friend of mine said that humans can see curses when they’re in a life or death situation.” His large hands massaged your shoulders as he spoke. “I wanna see if we can have fun together even when you can’t see me.”

Your breathing became uneven and you started struggling against the unknown force holding you down.

Mahito moved his hands to your shoulder blades and slid them lower until he grabbed you by your hips. You gasped when he pressed himself against you. “Oh, so you can feel this .” He slowly grinded against you.

Your hands balled up to fists and you pressed your forehead against the cold concrete. There was something on top of you, something firm and thick was pressing on you. You were rocking back and forth with a very familiar feeling of a cock on your ass.

Mahito’s grinding became harder to get a reaction out of you. He pushed his growing clothed erection against your ass to explicitly stimulate the movement of fucking you.

You bit your lips to hold back a moan. You hadn’t gone insane yet, there was something humping you. There was a small moment where you tried to move and crawl away from this entity but your body became frozen when you felt your skirt was getting hiked up.

“You’re so cute~” He pulled his own pants down. “Very pretty.”

The weight on top of you disappeared, taking the opportunity you tried crawling away but your body got flipped around.

Now, you were facing the ceiling of the sewers with nobody in sight yet there were hands fondling your tits.

“Stop,” you whimpered. “Please.”

Mahito smirked, getting his face awfully close to yours. He let his tongue loll out from his mouth and licked your lips.

You let out a startled scream, you tried kicking your invisible attacker but it was useless to even try. You couldn’t fight something you couldn’t see.

“Mm, you taste so sweet,” he whispered. His lips pressed against yours experimentally and bit your bottom lip. You reacted by turning your face to the side.

Boring.

Having had pulled his pants down before, Mahito grabbed his fully erect cock. He stroked it from the base to the pink tip glistening with precum as he relished on your view.

“I really wanna know the name of  my cute new doll.” He used a free hand to spread your legs, although you tried fighting back, he quickly outpowered you. He pouted when you didn’t say anything regarding what he had said.

“Please,” you whispered, starting to pray for whoever was listening. Your hand went between your legs to cover yourself but it stopped midway when you felt something firm press and move against your clit. An involuntary moan left your lips.

Mahito chuckled at your reaction and tapped his cock on your clit before dragging the tip between your folds to cover it with your juices. “You’re wet only because of me, right?” he asked, smirking.

Your lips parted as he lined himself up on your entrance. He waited until your tense body relaxed and shoved his cock inside you in one go once he caught you off guard.

You let out another moan but it got muffled by Mahito’s lips. While you were tensing and yelping because of the girth of his cock stretching you out, he was snaking his tongue inside your mouth with dark amusement.

Whether it be because of fear or pleasure, your gummy walls were clenching around his cock. It was more than enough to let Mahito know that he could move now.

Pulling his hips back and face back, he slammed into you abruptly to force a moan out of you. However, you didn’t make a sound. He looked down at you to notice how you were pressing your lips together, refusing to make it fun.

He sighed but didn’t let it ruin the mood. Instead, he frantically started fucking you. His hips surged forward with frenzy, he was whispering praises but you heard none of them.

Your pussy was being forcefully stretched by something thick and firm, you didn’t know exactly what it was but you also knew. You just didn’t want to acknowledge it.

It moved in and out of your pussy, stroking only the right spots and massaging your gummy walls enticingly. Your juices were gushing out of your hole that was being fucked, making disgustingly wet sounds.

One of your hands went to your pussy, unable to fight back the entity, you tried blocking it with your hand from ravishing you.

A sharp thrust of his hips was all it took to make you squirm and fall back on the concrete.

Mahito put a hand on your clit and started rubbing tight circles on your nub as he continued his animalistic pace to hammer into your pussy.

Arching your back, you moaned. Your pussy was spasming around his cock, begging for more.

“At least your body is honest.” Mahito watched you convulse in pleasure with a chuckle. He pushed your legs up to your chest and began pounding deeper in your pussy.

Your eyes rolled up, hands trying to grab onto something to steady yourself but there was nothing on the concrete. This was it, you were close.

“Do you think a cursed spirit and a human can make a baby?” His pace slackened, your clenching walls had caught him by surprise. He chuckled before languidly answering his own question. “Let’s try and see, yeah? Whaddaya say, sweetie?”

You quivered when his cock kissed your cervix. Your mouth gaped open in a silent moan as your orgasm shook you to your core.

“Haha, you look so needy and dumb!” Mahito’s cock twitched inside you, he groaned loudly. He tried holding himself back and stealing a couple more thrusts into your pussy before the fun ended but his thrusts had started becoming shaky. His hips lurched forward one last time, pushing as far as he could to spill his seed deep inside your womb and filled your pussy until it overflowed.

Mahito pulled back and held your hips up to hold his seed inside you without letting another drop go to waste. This was going to be one of his experiments, he decided with a sickening smile on his face.

You were far too exhausted to feel anything other than the warmth that filled your tummy.

The rest… was a blur.

~~~

Although what happened that night was supposed to be traumatic, nowadays; you found yourself feeling a lot safer walking home at night. Whenever someone followed you or someone with malicious intent tried getting near you, there was a guardian angel that stopped them with a small price of you letting it indulge in your slick heat.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Unauthorized Bread: Real rebellions involve jailbreaking IoT toasters

"Unauthorized Bread"—a tale of jailbreaking refugees versus IoT appliances—is the lead novella in author Cory Doctorow's Radicalized, which has just been named a finalist for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's national book award, the Canada Reads prize. "Unauthorized Bread" is also in development for television with Topic, parent company of The Intercept; and for a graphic novel adaptation by Firstsecond, in collaboration with the artist and comics creator Jennifer Doyle. It appears below with permission from the author.

The way Salima found out that Boulangism had gone bankrupt: her toaster wouldn’t accept her bread. She held the slice in front of it and waited for the screen to show her a thumbs-up emoji, but instead, it showed her the head-scratching face and made a soft brrt. She waved the bread again. Brrt.

“Come on.” Brrt.

She turned the toaster off and on. Then she unplugged it, counted to ten, and plugged it in. Then she menued through the screens until she found RESET TO FACTORY DEFAULT, waited three minutes, and punched her Wi-Fi password in again.

Brrt.

Long before she got to that point, she’d grown certain that it was a lost cause. But these were the steps that you took when the electronics stopped working, so you could call the 800 number and say, “I’ve turned it off and on, I’ve unplugged it, I’ve reset it to factory defaults and…”

There was a touchscreen option on the toaster to call support, but that wasn’t working, so she used the fridge to look up the number and call it. It rang seventeen times and disconnected. She heaved a sigh. Another one bites the dust.

The toaster wasn’t the first appliance to go (that honor went to the dishwasher, which stopped being able to validate third-party dishes the week before when Disher went under), but it was the last straw. She could wash dishes in the sink but how the hell was she supposed to make toast—over a candle?

Just to be sure, she asked the fridge for headlines about Boulangism, and there it was, their cloud had burst in the night. Socials crawling with people furious about their daily bread. She prodded a headline and learned that Boulangism had been a ghost ship for at least six months because that’s how long security researchers had been contacting the company to tell it that all its user data—passwords, log-ins, ordering and billing details—had been hanging out there on the public internet with no password or encryption. There were ransom notes in the database, records inserted by hackers demanding cryptocurrency payouts in exchange for keeping the dirty secret of Boulangism’s shitty data handling. No one had even seen them.

Boulangism’s share price had declined by 98 percent over the past year. There might not even be a Boulangism anymore. When Salima had pictured Boulangism, she’d imagined the French bakery that was on the toaster’s idle-screen, dusted with flour, woodblock tables with serried ranks of crusty loaves. She’d pictured a rickety staircase leading up from the bakery to a suite of cramped offices overlooking a cobbled road. She’d pictured gas lamps.

The article had a street-view shot of Boulangism’s headquarters, a four-story office block in Pune, near Mumbai, walled in with an unattended guard booth at the street entrance.

The Boulangism cloud had burst and that meant that there was no one answering Salima’s toaster when it asked if the bread she was about to toast had come from an authorized Boulangism baker, which it had. In the absence of a reply, the paranoid little gadget would assume that Salima was in that class of nefarious fraudsters who bought a discounted Boulangism toaster and then tried to renege on her end of the bargain by inserting unauthorized bread, which had consequences ranging from kitchen fires to suboptimal toast (Boulangism was able to adjust its toasting routine in realtime to adjust for relative kitchen humidity and the age of the bread, and of course it would refuse to toast bread that had become unsalvageably stale), to say nothing of the loss of profits for the company and its shareholders. Without those profits, there’d be no surplus capital to divert to R&D, creating the continuous improvement that meant that hardly a day went by without Salima and millions of other Boulangism stakeholders (never just “customers”) waking up with exciting new firmware for their beloved toasters.

And what of the Boulangism baker-partners? They’d done the right thing, signing up for a Boulangism license, subjecting their process to inspections and quality assurance that meant that their bread had exactly the right composition to toast perfectly in Boulangism’s precision-engineered appliances, with crumb and porosity in perfect balance to absorb butter and other spreads. These valued partners deserved to have their commitment to excellence honored, not cast aside by bargain-hunting cheaters who wanted to recklessly toast any old bread.

Salima knew these arguments, even before her stupid toaster played her the video explaining them, which it did after three unsuccessful bread-authorization attempts, playing without a pause or mute button as a combination of punishment and reeducation campaign.

She tried to search her fridge for “boulangism hacks” and “boulangism unlock codes” but appliances stuck together. KitchenAid’s network filters gobbled up her queries and spat back snarky “no results” screens even though Salima knew perfectly well that there was a whole underground economy devoted to unauthorized bread.

She had to leave for work in half an hour, and she hadn’t even showered yet, but goddamnit, first the dishwasher and now the toaster. She found her laptop, used when she’d gotten it, now barely functional. Its battery was long dead and she had to unplug her toothbrush to free up a charger cable, but after she had booted it and let it run its dozens of software updates, she was able to run the darknet browser she still had kicking around and do some judicious googling.

She was forty-five minutes late to work that day, but she had toast for breakfast. Goddamnit.

The dishwasher was next. Once Salima had found the right forum, it would have been crazy not to unlock the thing. After all, she had to use it and now it was effectively bricked. She wasn’t the only one who had the Disher/Boulangism double whammy, either. Some poor suckers also had the poor fortune to own one of the constellation of devices made by HP-NewsCorp—fridges, toothbrushes, even sex toys—all of which had gone down thanks to a failure of the company’s cloud provider, Tata. While this failure was unrelated to the Disher/Boulangism doubleheader, it was pretty unfortunate timing, everyone agreed.

The twin collapse of Disher and Boulangism did have a shared cause, Salima discovered. Both companies were publicly traded and both had seen more than 20 percent of their shares acquired by Summerstream Funds Management, the largest hedge fund on earth, with $184 billion under management. Summerstream was an “activist shareholder” and it was very big on stock buybacks. Once it had a seat on each company’s board—both occupied by Galt Baumgardner, a junior partner at the firm, but from a very good Kansas family—they both hired the same expert consultant from Deloitte to examine the company’s accounts and recommend a buyback program that would see the shareholders getting their due return from the firms, without gouging so deep into the companies’ operating capital as to endanger them.

It was all mathematically provable, of course. The companies could easily afford to divert billions from their balance sheets to the shareholders. Once this was determined, it was the board’s fiduciary duty to vote in favor of it (which was handy, since they all owned fat wads of company shares) and a few billion dollars later, the companies were lean, mean, and battle ready, and didn’t even miss all that money.

Oops.

Summerstream issued a press release (often quoted in the forums Salima was now obsessively haunting) blaming the whole thing on “volatility” and “alpha” and calling it “unfortunate” and “disappointing.” They were confident that both companies would restructure in bankruptcy, perhaps after a quick sale to a competitor, and everyone could start toasting bread and washing dishes within a month or two.

Salima wasn’t going to wait. Her Boulangism didn’t go easily. After downloading the new firmware from the darknet, she had to remove the case (slicing through three separate tamper-evident seals and a large warning sticker that threatened electrocution and prosecution, perhaps simultaneously, for anyone foolish enough to ignore it) and locate a specific component and then short out two of its pins with a pair of tweezers while booting it. This dropped the toaster into a test mode that the developers had deactivated, but not removed. The instant the test screen came up, she had to jam in her USB stick (removing the toaster’s hood had revealed a set of USB ports, a monitor port, and even a little Ethernet jack, all stock on the commodity single-board PC that controlled it) at exactly the right instant, then use the on-screen keyboard to tap in the log-in and password, which were “admin” and “admin” (of course).

It took her three tries to get the timing right, but on the third try, the spare log-in screen was replaced with the pirate firmware’s cheesy text-art animation of a 3-D skull, which she smiled at—and then she burst into laughter as a piece of text-art toast floated into the frame and was merrily chomped to crumbs by the text-art skull, the crumbs cascading to the bottom of the screen and forming shifting little piles. Someone had put a lot of effort into the physics simulation for that ridiculous animation. It made Salima feel good, like she was entrusting her toaster to deep, serious craftspeople and not just randos who liked to pit their wits against faceless programmers from big, stupid companies.

The crumbs piled up as the skull chomped and the progress indicator counted up from 12 percent to 26 percent then to 34 percent (where it stuck for a full ten minutes, until she was ready to risk really bricking the damned thing by unplugging it, but then—) 58 percent, and so on, to an agonizing wait at 99 percent, and then all the crumbs rushed up from the bottom of the screen and went back out through the skull’s mouth, turning back into toast, each reassembled piece forming up in ranks that quickly blotted out the skull, and the words ALL DONE burned themselves into the toast’s surface, glistening with butter that ran down in rivulets. She was just grabbing for her phone to get a picture of this awesome pirate load-screen when the toaster oven blinked and rebooted itself.

A few seconds later, she held a slice of bread to the toaster’s sensor and watched as its light turned green and its door yawned open. Halfway through munching the toast, she was struck by an odd curiosity. She held her hand up to the toaster, palm out, as though it, too, were a slice of bread. The toaster’s light turned green and the door opened. She was momentarily tempted to try and toast a fork or a paper towel or a slice of apple, just to see if the toaster would do it, but of course it would.

This was a new kind of toaster, a toaster that took orders, rather than giving them. A toaster that would give her enough rope to hang herself, let her toast a lithium battery or a can of hairspray, or anything else she wanted to toast: unauthorized bread. Even homemade bread. The idea made her feel a little queasy and a little tremorous. Homemade bread was something she’d read about in books, seen in old dramas, but she didn’t know anyone who actually baked bread. That was like gnawing your own furniture out of whole logs or something.

The ingredients turned out to be incredibly simple, and while her first loaf came out looking like a poop emoji, it tasted amazing, still warm from the little toaster, and if anything, the slice (OK, the lump) she saved and toasted the next morning was even better, especially with butter on it. She left for work that day with a magical, warm, toasty feeling in her stomach.

Read the rest:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

[classyfoxdestiny]

Tigray massacre: How an Ethiopian festival turned into a killing spree

Tigray massacre: How an Ethiopian festival turned into a killing spree

The corpses, some dressed in white church robes drenched in blood, were scattered in arid fields, scrubby farmlands and a dry riverbed. Others had been shot on their doorsteps with their hands bound with belts. Among the dead were priests, old men, women, entire families and a group of more than 20 Sunday school children, some as young as 14, according to eyewitnesses, parents and their teacher.

Abraham recognized some of the children immediately. They were from his town in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region, Edaga Hamus, and had also fled fighting there two weeks earlier. As clashes raged, Abraham and his family, along with hundreds of other displaced people, escaped to Dengelat, a nearby village in a craggy valley ringed by steep, rust-colored cliffs. They sought shelter at Maryam Dengelat, a historic monastery complex famed for a centuries-old, rock-hewn church.

On November 30, they were joined by scores of religious pilgrims for the Orthodox festival of Tsion Maryam, an annual feast to mark the day Ethiopians believe the Ark of the Covenant was brought to the country from Jerusalem. The holy day was a welcome respite from weeks of violence, but it would not last.

A group of Eritrean soldiers opened fire on Maryam Dengelat church while hundreds of congregants were celebrating mass, eyewitnesses say. People tried to flee on foot, scrambling up cliff paths to neighboring villages. The troops followed, spraying the mountainside with bullets.

A CNN investigation drawing on interviews with 12 eyewitnesses, more than 20 relatives of the survivors and photographic evidence sheds light on what happened next.

The soldiers went door to door, dragging people from their homes. Mothers were forced to tie up their sons. A pregnant woman was shot, her husband killed. Some of the survivors hid under the bodies of the dead.

The mayhem continued for three days, with soldiers slaughtering local residents, displaced people and pilgrims. Finally, on December 2, the soldiers allowed informal burials to take place, but threatened to kill anyone they saw mourning. Abraham volunteered.

Footage obtained by CNN shows the shoes of some of those killed in Dengelat. Credit: Obtained by CNN

Under their watchful eyes, he held back tears as he sorted through the bodies of children and teenagers, collecting identity cards from pockets and making meticulous notes about their clothing or hairstyle. Some were completely unrecognizable, having been shot in the face, Abraham said.

Then he covered their bodies with earth and thorny tree branches, praying that they wouldn’t be washed away, or carried off by prowling hyenas and circling vultures. Finally he placed their shoes on top of the burial mounds, so he could return with their parents to identify them.

One was Yohannes Yosef, who was just 15.

“Their hands were tied … young children … we saw them everywhere. There was an elderly man who had been killed on the road, an 80-something-year-old man. And the young kids they killed on the street in the open. I’ve never seen a massacre like this and I don’t want to [again],” Abraham said.

“We only survived by the grace of God.”

Abraham said he buried more than 50 people that day, but estimates more than 100 died in the assault.

They’re among thousands of civilians believed to have been killed since November, when Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 for resolving a long-running conflict with neighboring Eritrea, launched a major military operation against the political party that governs the Tigray region. He accused the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which ruled Ethiopia for nearly three decades before Abiy took office in 2018, of attacking a government military base and trying to steal weapons. The TPLF denies the claim.

The conflict is the culmination of escalating tensions between the two sides, and the most dire of several recent ethno-nationalist clashes in Africa’s second-most populous country.

After seizing control of Tigray’s main cities in late November, Abiy declared victory and maintained that no civilians were harmed in the offensive. Abiy has also denied that soldiers from Eritrea crossed into Tigray to support Ethiopian forces.

But the fighting has raged on in rural and mountainous areas where the TPLF and its armed supporters are reportedly hiding out, resisting Abiy’s drive to consolidate power. The violence has spilled over into local communities, catching civilians in the crossfire and triggering what the United Nations refugee agency has called the worst flight of refugees from the region in two decades.

The UN special adviser on genocide prevention said in early February that the organization had received multiple reports of “extrajudicial killings, sexual violence, looting, mass executions and impeded humanitarian access.”

Many of those abuses have been blamed on Eritrean soldiers, whose presence on the ground suggests that Abiy’s much-lauded peace deal with Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki set the stage for the two sides to wage war against the TPLF — their mutual enemy.

The US State Department, in a statement to CNN, called for Eritrean forces to be “withdrawn from Tigray immediately,” citing credible reports of their involvement in “deeply troubling conduct.” In response to CNN’s findings, the spokesperson said “reports of a massacre at Maryam Dengelat are gravely concerning and demand an independent investigation.”

Ethiopia responded to CNN’s request for comment with a statement that did not directly address the attack in Dengelat. The government said it would “continue bringing all perpetrators to justice following thorough investigations into alleged crimes in the region,” but gave no details about those investigations.

“They were taking them barefoot and killing them in front of their mothers”

Rahwa

More than three weeks after CNN published this investigation, the Eritrean embassy of the UK and Ireland responded on March 22 by denying allegations of wrongdoing by Eritrean soldiers and denying that Eritrean troops were in Ethiopia.

The TPLF said in a statement to CNN that its forces were nowhere near Dengelat at the time of the massacre. It rejected that the victims could have been mistaken for being TPLF and called for a UN investigation to hold all sides accountable for atrocities committed during the conflict.

Still, the situation inside the country remains opaque. Ethiopia’s government has severely restricted access to journalists and prevented most aid from reaching areas beyond the government’s control, making it challenging to verify accounts from survivors. And an intermittent communications blackout during the fighting has effectively blocked the war from the world’s eyes.

Now that curtain is being pulled back, as witnesses fleeing parts of Tigray reach internet access and phone lines are restored. They detail a disastrous conflict that has given rise to ethnic violence, including attacks on churches and mosques.

For months, rumors spread of a grisly assault on an Orthodox church in Dengelat. A list of the dead began circulating on social media in early December, shared among the Tigrayan diaspora. Then photos of the deceased, including young children, started cropping up online.

Through a network of activists and relatives, CNN tracked down eyewitnesses to the attack. In countless phone calls — many disconnected and dropped — Abraham and others provided the most detailed account of the deadly massacre to date.

Footage of the 2019 festival shows congregants celebrating outside the church. Credit: Bernadette Gilbertas

Eyewitnesses said that the festival started much as it had any other year. Footage of the celebrations from 2019 shows priests dressed in white ceremonial robes and crowns, carrying crosses aloft, leading hundreds of people in prayer at Maryam Dengelat church. The faithful sang, danced and ululated in unison.

As prayers concluded in the early hours of November 30, Abraham looked out from the hilltop where the church is perched to see troops arriving by foot, followed by more soldiers in trucks. At first, they were peaceful, he said. They were invited to eat, and rested under the shade of a tree grove.

But, as congregants were celebrating mass around midday, shelling and gunfire erupted, sending people fleeing up mountain paths and into nearby homes.

Desta, who helped with preparations for the festival, said he was at the church when troops arrived at the village entrance, blocking off the road and firing shots. He heard people screaming and fled, running up Ziqallay mountainside. From the rocky plateau he surveyed the chaos playing out below.

We could see people running here and there … [the soldiers] were killing everyone who was coming from the church,” Desta said.

Eight eyewitnesses said they could tell the troops were Eritrean, based on their uniforms and dialect. Some speculated that soldiers were meting out revenge by targeting young men, assuming they were members of the TPLF forces or allied local militias. But Abraham and others maintained there were no militia in Dengelat or the church.

Marta, who was visiting Dengelat for the holiday, says she left the church with her husband Biniam after morning prayers. As the newlyweds walked back to their relative’s home, a stream of people began sprinting up the hill, shouting that soldiers were rounding people up in the village.

She recalled the horrifying moment soldiers arrived at their house, shooting into the compound and calling out: “Come out, come out you b*tches.” Marta said they went outside holding their identity cards aloft, saying “we’re civilians.” But the troops opened fire anyway, hitting Biniam, his sister and several others.

“I was holding Bini, he wasn’t dead … I thought he was going to survive, but he died [in my arms].

The couple had just been married in October. Marta found out after the massacre that she was pregnant.

After the soldiers left, Marta, who said she was shot in the hand, helped drag the seven bodies inside, so that the hyenas wouldn’t eat them. “We slept near the bodies … and we couldn’t bury them because they [the soldiers] were still there,” she said.

Marta and other eyewitnesses described soldiers going house to house through Dengelat, dragging people outside, binding their hands or asking others to do so, and then shooting them.

Rahwa, who was part of the Sunday school group from Edaga Hamus and left Dengelat earlier than others, managing to escape being killed, said mothers were forced to tie up their sons.

“They were ordering their mothers to tie their sons’ hands. They were taking them barefoot and killing them in front of their mothers,” Rahwa said eyewitnesses told her.

Samuel, another eyewitness, said that he had eaten and drank with the soldiers before they came to his house, which is just behind the church, and killed his relatives. He said he survived by hiding underneath one of their bodies for hours.

“They started pushing the people out of their houses and they were killing all children, women and old men. After they killed them outside their houses, they were looting and taking all the property,” Samuel said.

As the violence raged, hundreds of people remained in the church hall. In a lull in the gunfire, priests advised those who could to go home, ushering them outside. Several of the priests were killed as they left the church, Abraham said.

With nowhere to run to, Abraham sheltered inside Maryam Dengelat, lying on the floor as artillery pounded the tin roof. “We lost hope and we decided to stay and die at the church. We didn’t try to run,” he said.

Two days later, the troops called parishioners down from the church to deal with the dead. Abraham said he and five other men spent the day burying bodies, including those from Marta’s household and the Sunday school children. But the troops forbid them from burying bodies at the church, in line with Orthodox tradition, and forced them to make mass graves instead — a practice that has been described elsewhere in Tigray.

“… most of them were eaten by vultures before they got buried, it was horrible”

Tedros

Abraham shared photos and videos of the grave sites, which CNN geolocated to Dengelat with the help of satellite image analysis from several experts. The analysis was unable to conclusively identify individual graves, which witnesses said were shallow, but one expert said there were signs that parts of the landscape had changed.

The initial bloodshed was followed by a period of two tense weeks, Abraham said. Soldiers stayed in the area in several encampments, stealing cars, burning crops and killing livestock before eventually moving on.

Tedros, who was born in Dengelat and traveled there after the soldiers had left, said that the village smelled of death and that vultures were circling over the mountains, a sign that there may be more bodies left uncounted there.

“Some of them were also killed in the far fields while they were trying to escape and most of them were eaten by vultures before they got buried, it was horrible. [The soldiers] tied them and killed them in front of their doors, and they shot them in the head just to save bullets,” he said.

Tedros visited the burial grounds described by eyewitnesses and said he saw cracks in the church walls where artillery hit. In interviews with villagers and family members, he compiled a death toll of more than 70 people.

The families hope that the names of their loved ones, which Tedros, Abraham and others risked their lives to record, will eventually be read out at a traditional funeral ceremony at the Maryam Dengelat church — rare closure in an ongoing conflict.

Three months after the massacre, the graves in Dengelat are a daily reminder of the bloodshed for the survivors who remain in the village. But it has not yet been safe enough to rebury the bodies of those who died, and that reality is weighing on them.

Update, March 22: A comment from the Eritrean embassy of the UK and Ireland has been added to this story.

Correction: An on-screen title in an earlier version of the video in this story misstated the date of CNN-obtained footage from Tigray. It was filmed in 2021.

Eliza Mackintosh wrote and reported. Barbara Arvanitidis, Nima Elbagir, Bethlehem Feleke, Gianluca Mezzofiore and Katie Polglase reported.

Edited by Nick Thompson. Video and editorial supervised by Dan Wright. Design and visual editing by Peter Robertson, Henrik Pettersson, Brett Roegiers, Sarah Tilotta, Temujin Doran and Lauren Cook.

Jennifer Hansler contributed to this report from Washington, DC.

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