Ethiopian PM in ‘critical’ state in Brussels clinic

Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi was in a Brussels hospital in a ‘critical’ state on Wednesday, several diplomatic sources said, but the Ethiopian government denied he was unwell.

The one-time Marxist who toppled the bloody dictatorship of Mengistu Haile Mariam in 1991 was in a life-threatening condition, a diplomat who asked not to be named said.

‘He is in a critical state, his life is in danger,’ said the diplomat. In Addis Ababa, however, government spokesman Bereket Simon denied reports that the 57-year-old premier who has held power for over two decades was ill. ‘In Brussels, the Ethiopian embassy refused comment. It had said earlier this week that reports Meles was being treated at a hospital were ‘false and wrong’, and were a rumour created by ‘an interest group which has preoccupied itself in disseminating such untrue stories’.

But several diplomats in Brussels said he had been undergoing regular treatment on a private basis at one of the city’s major hospitals and had been in hospital for some days.

No information was available on his illness. Questions surfaced about Meles’s health when he missed a two-day African Union summit Sunday and Monday in Addis Ababa, apparently for the first time. Meles’s wife, herself a lawmaker, had declined to talk to reporters about her husband.

One of the last times Meles was seen in public was at the G20 meeting in Mexico on 19 June. Dozens of African heads of state visited Ethiopia for the summit, including newly elected Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, the first to do so since an assassination attempt in Ethiopia on former president Hosni Mubarak in 1995.