In an interview with The Independent Meles said that the BBC had fallen for lies put out by his political opponents on the eve of a general election in Ethiopia coming May.

"The notion that a decision was taken to spend 95 per cent of aid on the military is a complete lie," he said. "Anyone who knows anything about the situation in Tigray in 1984-85 would know that. The logic of that would be just ridiculous." The rebels were then fighting the army of the Mengistu dictatorship whose troops were mainly conscripts who often ran away and abandoned their weapons when fighting began.

"We captured large amounts of guns and tanks. We did not need to buy arms. What we needed was food. So why would we sell food to buy arms?" Meles said. "We needed food because by 84-85 we had an extensive liberated area under our control.

But it was terribly hit by famine. The danger was that the population, on whom we depended, would leave the liberated area and go over to the government area in search of food. So we needed the food to keep our people in our area.” 

"There would have been no military logic in selling food to buy guns. It would have been completely suicidal to starve our own people to buy guns. We would have had no movement if we had had no people.

When not enough food was available we encouraged hundreds of thousands of people to make the long trek across the border to Sudan." Five other leading aid agencies have criticised the BBC report.

Oxfam, Save the Children and Christian Aid were yesterday drawing up a joint complaint. Band Aid's lawyers were preparing an official complaint for the broadcasting standards watchdog Ofcom.