Addis Ababa - An Ethiopian court has found eight alleged members of a Somali Islamic group guilty of killing 36 civilians in bomb attacks on hotels and other targets in the mid-1990s, the Ethiopian News Agency reported on Friday.
ENA said the eight were found guilty at a hearing on Thursday of "detonating explosives at restaurants, railway lines and public places causing the deaths of 36 innocent civilians and the destruction of property," ENA said.
The eight were allegedly members of the al-Itihad al-Islamiya group, which claimed responsibility for the attacks at the time they were carried out in 1995 and 1996.
Al-Itihad first came to prominence in the early 1990s as a military group aiming to create a unified Islamic state in Somalia and an ethnic Somali region in neighbouring Ethiopia.
United Nations humanitarian workers and Somali experts say al-Itihad has since renounced violence and now runs educational and welfare programmes in Somalia, a country riven by fighting between clan-based warlords.
Ethiopia, which launched a military strike against al-Itihad in Somalia in 1996, accuses Somalia's transitional government of sheltering the group, saying al-Itihad has links to the al Qaeda network of Osama bin Laden.
The United States placed al-Itihad on a list of "terrorist" organisations after the September 11 attacks due to suspected al Qaeda links and says it is seeking more information on possible extremists groups in anarchic Somalia.
Some Somalis and Western analysts accuse Ethiopian officials of exaggerating reports about Islamic extremism in Somalia to secure US support for their efforts to increase landlocked Ethiopia's influence in the country.
The eight Somalis were remanded in custody after being convicted at a hearing from which the media was excluded. They will be sentenced at a later date.
About 15 people were killed in May 1995 when attackers alleged to be members of al-Itihad tossed a hand grenade into a bustling market in the eastern Ethiopian town of Dire Dawa.
Six people were killed in 1995 in a bomb blast at the Ghion Hotel, one of the largest state-owned hotels in Addis Ababa. In 1996, two people were killed and 11 wounded in an attack on state-owned Wabe Shebelle hotel in Addis Ababa.
Thirteen others were reported killed by explosives allegedly detonated by the group on railway lines.
Gunmen alleged to be members of the al-Itihad group shot and wounded Abdulmejid Hussein, transport minister at the time of the attack, in a 1996 assassination attempt.