Hundreds of people lived next to the 50-year-old Reppi dump, known as "Koshe" or "dirty" in the Amharic language. Biniam's father Tsegaye said residents had often complained to city authorities about the dump, warning it fostered disease and put local families at risk. It was supposed to gradually close from 2015, but when garbage trucks began taking rubbish to a new site, protests erupted. It remained the city's only landfill site, taking in daily deliveries of trash from the city's 5 million residents. At the site on Sunday, dozens of volunteers and emergency workers scrabbled through stinking waste, vultures hovering above them.

Source: Ethiopian News March 19, 2017 16:30 UTC