MOGADISHU: Amassive car bomb exploded in a busy area of Mogadishu yesterday, leaving atleast 78 people dead, many of them university students, in Somalia's deadliestattack in two years. The blast occurred at a busy intersection southwest of theSomali capital where the presence of a security checkpoint and a tax officeoften cause traffic jams. Scores of wounded were carried on stretchers from thesite, where the force of the explosion left the charred and twisted remains ofvehicles.
The attack hasnot been claimed, however Mogadishu is regularly hit by car bombings andattacks waged by Al-Shabaab Islamist militants allied to Al-Qaeda. PresidentMohamed Abdullahi Farmaajo condemned the attack in comments carried by theSomalia national news agency SONNA. "This enemy works to implement thedestructive will of international terrorism, they have never done anythingpositive for this our country, they have not constructed a road, never builthospitals and not education centers as well," he said. "All they dois destruction and killing and the Somali public are well informed aboutthis."
Many of thosekilled are believed to be university students whose bus was hit by the blast.Two Turkish nationals also died, police said. "The number of the dead fromthe blast is still increasing, we now have 78 dead and 125 injured," thedirector of the private Aamin Ambulance service, Abdukadir Abdirahman Haji,told AFP. Police officer Ibrahim Mohamed described the explosion as"devastating".
"We haveconfirmed that two Turkish nationals, presumably road construction engineersare among the dead, we don't have details about whether they were passing bythe area or stayed in the area," he said. Turkey's defense ministry wroteon Twitter it had sent a military plane "loaded with emergency aidequipment... in order to provide emergency aid to our Somali brothers injuredin the despicable terror attack in Somalia".
SakariyeAbdukadir, who was near the area when the car bomb detonated, said the blast"destroyed several of my car windows". "All I could see wasscattered dead bodies... and some of them burned beyond recognition."Prime Minister Hassan Ali Khiere appointed an emergency committee to work onproviding help to those who have been wounded in the blast.
"We willseek medical assistance outside the country for those whose health situationcannot be dealt with inside the country. We are calling on the Somali publicboth, inside and outside the country to take part in assisting the victims, andto stand together in the fight against Al-Shabaab", the prime ministertold Radio Mogadishu.
Mogadishu's mayorOmar Mohamud Mohamed told a news conference that the exact number of dead wasnot yet known. "We will confirm the exact number of the number of the deadlater but it is not going to be small, most of the dead were innocentuniversity students and other civilians," he said. Witness Muhibo Ahmedsaid the attack was a "devastating incident because there were many peopleincluding students in buses who were passing by the area when the blastoccurred".
Mogadishu isregularly hit by attacks by the Shabaab, which has fought for more than adecade to topple the Somali government. The militant group emerged from theIslamic Courts Union that once controlled central and southern Somalia and isvariously estimated to number between 5,000 and 9,000 men. In 2010, the Shabaabdeclared their allegiance to Al-Qaeda.
The followingyear, its fighters fled positions they once held in the capital Mogadishu, andhave since lost many strongholds. But they retain control of large ruralswathes of the country and continue to wage a guerrilla war against theauthorities, managing to inflict bloody death tolls in attacks at home and abroad.Two weeks ago, five people were killed when Shabaab militants attacked aMogadishu hotel popular with politicians, army officers and diplomats in anhours-long siege.
Since 2015, therehave been 13 attacks in Somalia with death tolls above 20. Eleven of these havebeen in Mogadishu, according to a tally of AFP figures. All of them involvedcar bombs. The deadliest attack in the country's history was a truck bombing inOctober 2017 in Mogadishu which left 512 people dead and around 295 injured. -AFP