General elections were held in Ethiopia on 15 May 2005, for seats in the House of Peoples' Representatives and four regional government councils.

The observer mission described the atmosphere "during the campaign was calm, culminating in two massive, peaceful rallies in Addis Ababa, one by the EPRDF and one by the opposition.

"Campaign rhetoric became insulting," the EU observer's report noted, then continued: The most extreme example of this came from the Deputy Prime Minister, Addisu Legesse, who, in a public debate on 15 April, compared the opposition parties with the Interhamwe militia, which perpetrated the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

The opposition coalition UEDF then used the comparison against the government in a TV spot showing footage of the movie "Hotel Rwanda".

[3]Early results showed the opposition with a big lead, sweeping all of the contested seats in the capital Addis both in the race for parliamentary as well as local government.

By the afternoon of 16 May, the opposition claimed it was halfway towards winning a majority in the national parliament with only about a third of the constituencies reporting complete results.

The two major opposition parties, the Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD) and the United Ethiopian Democratic Forces (UEDF) claimed on that same day that they had won 185 of the approximately 200 seats for which the National Election Board of Ethiopia (NEBE) had released preliminary results.

However, the vote tallying process was jeopardized when the opposition claimed that the Addis Ababa vote was rigged and during the evening of 16 May, the Prime Minister declared a state of emergency, outlawed any public gathering, assumed direct command of the security forces, and replaced the capital city police with federal police and special forces drawn from elite army units.

Counting was slow, a remarkably high number of ballots were ruled invalid, and there was a lack of transparency in the results.

"[4] The situation only deteriorated with the following day, according to the observers, starting with a blanket ban, issued immediately after the end of voting, on freedom of assembly in the capital.

During a demonstration in Addis Ababa on 8 June, security forces killed at least 36 citizens and in the aftermath arrested thousands of persons, mostly linked to the opposition, who were accused of spreading "political unrest".

[5] Writing in November of that year, scholar Christopher Clapham noted that "the official results of the elections are both complex in themselves, and deeply affected by fraud".

Hundreds of students were arrested in at least nine cities, including Gondar, Bure, Bahir Dar, Debre Marqos, Dessie and Awassa for demonstrating despite a month-old ban on protests imposed on the government.

This led to the leaders of the CUD, including head Hailu Shawul, being put under house arrest while hundreds of security forces patrolled the streets of the capital.

The vice chairman of the inquiry, judge Wolde-Michael Meshesha, who fled Ethiopia a month prior after he had received anonymous death threats, told AP that "this was a massacre ... these demonstrators were unarmed yet the majority died from shots to the head."