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The Ethiopian leadership said earlier this year that they were “going to wipe out the Tigrayans for 100 years”, a European Union special envoy to the war-torn country has said.

The remarks by Pekka Haavisto, Finland’s foreign minister, describing his talks with Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and other ministers in February are some of the sharpest yet on the conflict in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region.

They came in a question-and-answer session on Tuesday with a European Parliament committee.

Ethiopia’s foreign ministry dismissed Haavisto’s comments as “ludicrous” and a “hallucination of sorts or a lapse in memory of some kind”.

Haavisto’s special adviser, Otto Turtonen, told The Associated Press that the envoy “has no further comment on this matter”.

In February he said he had “two intensive days in substantive meetings” with Abiy – the Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2019 – and other “key ministers” about the growing humanitarian crisis in Tigray, where thousands of civilians have been killed and famine has begun in a region of some 6 million people.

Ethiopian and allied forces from neighbouring Eritrea have been accused of atrocities while pursuing fighters supporting Tigray’s former leaders.

It is not clear from Haavisto’s remarks this week which Ethiopian officials allegedly made the comments about wiping out ethnic Tigrayans.

“When I met the Ethiopian leadership in February they really used this kind of language, that they are going to destroy the Tigrayans, they are going to wipe out the Tigrayans for 100 years and so forth,” the envoy said.

“If you wipe out your national minority, well, what is it?” Haavisto said.

“You cannot destroy all the people, you cannot destroy all the population in Tigray. And I think that’s very obvious, that we have to react, because it looks for us like ethnic cleansing. It is a very, very serious act if this is true,” he said.-Al Jazeera.