Dawit was watching television at a relative's one-room apartment in Axum, a historic city in Ethiopia's war-torn, northern Tigray region, in early March when a news bulletin flashed up on the screen.
Graphic, unverified footage had surfaced of a mass killing near Dawit's hometown of Mahibere Dego, in a mountainous area of central Tigray. In the shaky video Ethiopian soldiers appeared to round up a group of young, unarmed men on a wind-swept, dusty ledge before shooting them at point-blank range -- picking them up by an arm or a leg and flinging or kicking their bodies off a rocky hillside like ragdolls.
The soldiers can be heard in the footage urging one another not to waste bullets, to use the minimum amount needed to kill and to make sure none of the group were left alive. They also appear to cheer each other on, praising the killings as heroic and hurling insults at the men in their captivity.
Dawit said he believes one of the men in the video, broadcast on a diaspora television station Tigrai Media House (TMH), was his younger brother, Alula. CNN has changed the names of both brothers for Dawit's safety.
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