Ethiopia plays down speaker's defection

The Ethiopian government says the defection of the parliamentary speaker, Almaz Meko, to the United States was for personal reasons, not political ones.

Ms Meko applied for asylum in Washington this week accusing the Ethiopian Government of being a one-man dictatorship intent on persecuting people from the biggest community, the Oromos.

But a government official, Almaz Mekonnen accused Ms Meko of jumping on the Oromo rights bandwagon, saying in more than 10 years as a senior official, she had never previously mentioned ethnic politics.

A BBC correspondent in Addis Ababa says the ruling EPRDF there has been facing an internal power struggle in recent months, with a number of dismissals and defections.

From the newsroom of the BBC World Service