Scores of freshly-dug graves fill the church compound in Mai-Kadra. Shovels abandoned by weary hands are strewn on the dirt among empty cans of lemon air freshener that fail to mask the stench of death.

Elsewhere in this town in western Tigray, dozens of corpses still awaiting a grave lie abandoned in a roadside ditch, their exposed flesh rotting in the sun.

No-one denies that something terrible unfolded here: a massacre of hundreds of civilians, who were shot, slashed or stabbed with knives and machetes.

It is the worst-known episode of violence against civilians in the deepening bloodshed in northern Ethiopia.

But the dead are now pawns in a blame game. Participants in the three-week-old conflict are seeking to absolve themselves of an atrocity that bears the hallmarks of a war crime.

- Contested narrative -

The massacre on November 9 was revealed by rights group Amnesty International, using photo and video analysis and interviews with witnesses who said retreating forces loyal to the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) were responsible for killing ethnic Amhara residents of the town.

Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's government has seized upon this narrative, the atrocity providing further arguments for pressing his offensive against the dissident leadership of the northern Tigray region.

On Tuesday, the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (EHRC), a government-affiliated body, issued a report blaming a Tigrayan youth group as well as local police and militia for the massacre of at least 600 people it said were "pre-identified" by ethnicity.

But Tigrayan refugees who fled Mai-Kadra for Sudan instead say pro-government forces were responsible for the killings during a brutal assault on the town of 40,000 people.

- 'Ethnic cleansing' -

Last week AFP gained rare access to territory controlled by the federal government in the northern conflict zone and visited Mai-Kadra.

Amhara residents of the town said their Tigrayan neighbours had turned on them as the fighting drew close.

"Militiamen and police attacked us with guns, and civilians attacked us with machetes," said Misganaw Gebeyo, a 23-year-old Amhara farmhand now lying in a hospital bed, a ragged scar extending below the medical gauze encasing his head. "The whole population is involved."

He recalled hiding at home, watching in terror as assailants decapitated his friend with a machete. He too was hacked and left for dead.

"They wanted to exterminate the Amharas," Misganaw said.

The town's newly-appointed administrator, a government loyalist called Fentahun Bihohegn, described the massacre as an act of attempted "genocide" against his fellow Amharas.

"A brutal ethnic cleansing has been committed against the Amhara people," Fentahun said, describing the entire TPLF, whether leaders or members, as "criminals".

"For me, I have witnessed the real hell here in Mai-Kadra," he said.

- Corpses in the streets -

A different story of the massacre can be found a short distance to the west, in the mushrooming refugee camps across the border

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