Somalia’s Shebab said it had carried out a car bombing that killed at least seven people in the capital Mogadishu Thursday, targeting security forces at a cafe close to the intelligence headquarters.
Police said seven people had been killed, but some witnesses said they had counted eight corpses among the charred wreckage of the tea shop. Several badly wounded casualties were taken to hospital.
The bombing is the latest in a a surge of attacks in the dangerous capital, where the Al-Qaeda-linked Shebab is fighting to topple the internationally backed government.
Recent Shebab attacks have targeted key areas of government or the security forces, in an apparent bid to discredit claims by the authorities that they are winning the war against the Islamist fighters.
“We carried out the bombing against officers of the national security,” Shebab spokesman Abdiaziz Abu Musab told AFP, boasting of having killed 11 people, including senior officers.
However, police official Ahmed Mumin told AFP that officers had “counted seven civilians killed in the car bomb,” although adding that the “toll could be higher as many people were also wounded”.
Some witnesses suggested the blast had been detonated by a suicide bomber driving the car, which they said swerved into the cafe reportedly popular with security officials, near the city’s Lido beach.
Soldiers fired into the air after the blast to keep crowds back, as some civilians rushed in to pick up the wounded using sheets as makeshift stretchers, said an AFP photographer at the scene.
– Shebab still powerful force –
Somali Prime Minister Abdiweli Sheikh Ahmed said the attack was “a betrayal of Islam and of the peaceful Somali communities who want to see a new secure, stable and united Somalia.”
UN special envoy Nick Kay condemned the “atrocity” and said he would “stand firm with Somalis on the path to peace.”
The blast comes just a week after Shebab militants carried out a major attack against the heavily fortified presidential palace, killing officials and guards in heavy gun battles.
After that attack, on one of the best-defended locations in the war-torn country, President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud branded the Shebab “a marginal group on the brink of extinction” and vowed Somalia’s army and the African Union’s AMISOM force would “eliminate” them.
Thursday’s attack follows a string of Shebab bombings in and around Mogadishu, with night-time mortar rounds fired into the vast, heavily guarded airport complex, home to the 22,000-strong AMISOM force as well as foreign diplomats and aid workers.
The group, which also carried out last year’s attack at the Westgate shopping mall in the Kenyan capital that left at least 67 people dead, once controlled most of southern and central Somalia but withdrew from fixed positions in the war-ravaged coastal capital two years ago.
AU troops — including large contingents from Uganda, Kenya and Burundi — have since recaptured the insurgents’ main bases and tried to prop up Somalia’s fledgling government forces.
But Shebab guerrilla units have carried out a spate of killings in the capital, and their continued presence has dampened hopes the group was in the process of imploding amid a fierce internal power struggle.
However, Ethiopia, which joined the AU force last month, two years after sending troops back into Somalia to battle the Shebab, is reportedly massing its forces in the central Hiran region ahead of the latest push against Shebab-held towns.