A Somali woman walks past the scene of a suicide auto explosion in Hodan district in the capital Moga …
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Dr. Nabil El Araby, Secretary-General of the Arab League, has condemned the terrorist attack which targeted a convoy of UAE officials in Mogadishu.
They were military trainers, Hussein Afrah, a Somali military officer, told Reuters, confirming the intended targets were n ” ot hurt.
Source say death toll could rise as many passersby were caught at the site of the suicide attack. “Three Somali military … died and several other civilians who were passing by were injured”, Afrah told Reuters.
The Islamic extremist group Al Shabab has taken responsibility for the suicide bombing. Ambassador al-Othmani last week donated police and military equipment on behalf of the UAE to help Somalia fight al-Shabaab, whose decade-long campaign to build a fundamentalist state has cost thousands of lives.
The militants have also carried out a string of revenge attacks in neighbouring countries – including the September 2013 attack on the Westgate shopping mall in the Kenyan capital Nairobi, which left at least 67 people dead, and the April massacre of close to 150 students in Garissa in Kenya’s northeast. Shebab put the number of those killed at nine.
“I condemn today’s appalling attack against innocent civilians and dedicated worldwide officials who are providing critical peace-building and state building support to Somalia”, Kay said in a statement.
The Al-Qaeda-aligned group has in the past stepped up attacks during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, which began a week ago.
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At the same time, however, he conceded that there was “still a long way to go”, adding that with so much at stake between now and 2016, “we can expect Al-Shabaab to do everything it can to derail the political process”.
