LONDON (UPI) -- Ethiopia's armed forces toppled Emperor Haile Selassie today from his 3,000-year-old throne and proclaimed a military regime to rule the country temporarily.
The armed forces promised new elections and invited Selassie's son, Crown Prince Woosan to take the throne as a figurehead constitutional monarch, U.S. Embassy sources in London said. Woosan, 57, is ill in Switzerland.
Selassie, the tiny, 82-year-old "Lion of Judah," bowed to the inevitable this morning and accepted an Armed Forces Committee decree deposing him as Emperor of the nation he had ruled since 1916, the sources said.
The American sources said Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, was quiet. They said they had no word of the Emperor's whereabouts. Other sources said he had been taken from the palace his army nationalized a month ago and conveyed to a place "specially prepared for him."
The armed forces decree did not abolish Ethiopia's monarchy, which is said to trace in an unbroken line from a union between the Biblical King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.
