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ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia (Reuters) - Attackers killed almost 200 people in western Ethiopia, most of them small-scale miners, when mounting ethnic tensions in the area exploded into a day of bloodshed, the government said Wednesday. The January 30 killings were one of the worst outbreaks of communal violence for years in Ethiopia, a landlocked country of about 67 million people divided into a large number of linguistic and ethnic groups. It takes a while for information to trickle into the capital Addis Ababa from remote towns like Dima, more than 500 miles west of the city, due to poor communications. "On 30th January, in the Dima district of Gambella bordering the Sudan, 196 people were killed, of whom 172 were traditional miners mainly from the Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples state," Ethiopia's ministry of federal affairs said in a statement.