A government-appointed commission in Tanzania has found that 518 people died as a result of violence following the country's October 2025 general election, a figure sharply contested by the opposition and civil society groups who put the death toll in the thousands. The report, presented on Thursday in Dar es Salaam — Tanzania's largest city and commercial capital — states that 490 of the dead were male, and that victims included 21 children and 16 security officers. More than 2,000 people were also reported injured.

Commission chairman Mohamed Chande Othman, a senior judge, said the deaths resulted from "unnatural causes" during widespread protests that followed the October 29 presidential election. Rather than blaming security forces, the report pointed directly at protesters, with Othman claiming "irrefutable evidence" that the violence was "planned, coordinated, financed and carried out by trained individuals." The commission also attributed the unrest to economic frustrations, unemployment and what it described as a "lack of patriotism" among the country's youth. Claims of mass graves, widely circulated in the aftermath of the vote, "could not be substantiated," the report said, with Othman alleging that some images had been manipulated using artificial intelligence.

President Samia Suluhu Hassan, who won the election with 98 percent of the vote, said the report "shook our nation" and pledged to take its recommendations into account. She defended the conduct of security forces, arguing they had prevented anarchy, while asserting that reports of the human cost had been "exaggerated." The commission recommended a national day of mourning, free medical care for survivors, a criminal investigation to identify those who "masterminded" the violence, and the drafting of a new constitution by 2028.

The main opposition party, Chadema, swiftly dismissed the findings as a "cover-up" and "an attempt to whitewash the regime's crimes." Opposition groups and non-governmental organisations have alleged that up to 2,000 people were killed and 5,000 injured across the country, and accuse authorities of disappearing bodies into mass graves and cutting off internet access at the height of the unrest. An anonymous protester who participated in the October demonstrations expressed frustration at the report's silence on accountability: "We wanted names of those responsible and proof that justice would not be selective."

The stark gap between the government's figures and those of the opposition underscores the deep political divisions gripping Tanzania in the aftermath of an election that international observers and critics had already questioned. Whether the promised criminal investigation will lead to meaningful accountability — or address opposition demands for answers about the missing and the dead — remains to be seen. The report nonetheless marks the first official reckoning with a crisis that drew widespread international concern and human rights scrutiny.