This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

03 – 17 – 2022

By Simon Marks and Declan Walsh

As the fight intensified in northern Ethiopia in June last year, three aid workers from Doctors Without Borders jumped into their four-wheel drive and raced across the battle-scarred landscape, searching for casualties.

Hours later they vanished. The aid workers stopped answering their satellite phone. A tracking device showed their vehicle making a sudden U-turn, then stopping. Colleagues frantically tried to locate them.

The next day they were found dead, their bullet-riddled bodies sprawled on a dusty roadside near their burned-out vehicle: María Hernández, a 35-year-old Spaniard and conflict veteran, in a bloodstained white bib with the Doctors Without Borders logo; Yohannes Halefom, a 32-year-old Ethiopian medic, face down in the dirt; and their Ethiopian driver Tedros Gebremariam, 31, lying on the road about 300 yards away.

Doctors Without Borders, widely known by its French name, Médecins Sans Frontières, immediately denounced the killings as “brutal murder” but did not identify any culprit. Now, one is coming into view.