Before the hotel attack, government officials on Wednesday announced two strikes against the militants – one in which the head of the al Shabaab intelligence unit was killed, and another which killed the suspected mastermind of an attack on a university in Kenya, in which 148 people died previous year.
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On Wednesday, al-Shabaab claimed responsibility for an attack on the Hotel Ambassador in Somalia’s capital city of Mogadishu that killed at least 16 people and injured 55 others. “More than 10 people are so far confirmed dead and many others are wounded”. Officials say the death toll will likely increase. Mohamed Mohamud, better known as Dulyadeyn, allegedly masterminded the April 2015 attack on Kenya’s Garissa University College that left 148 people dead, almost all of them students.
The auto bomb and gun attack at the Ambassador Hotel on Maka al-Mukarama street killed 15 people, according to health officials and eyewitnesses. It was the worst attack by Islamist terrorists in Kenya since the 1998 bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi that killed more than 200 people. The strike, which took place in Raso, a village approximately 120 miles north of Mogadishu, was the deadliest strike on the terror group in more than a decade. Somalia’s Islamic extremist rebels, al-Shabab, stormed the hotel, often frequented by governme.
Abdinur said Mohamed Mohamud Ali alias Dulyadayn, most wanted Al-Shabaab leader was among the militants killed in a special operation in lower Jubba region. “Our mujahideen are on the top floor of the hotel building”, Sheikh Abdiasis Abu Musab, a spokesman for al Shabaab’s military, told Reuters.
A security source told AFP that “a VBIED (vehicle-borne improvised explosive device) exploded” after which a firefight erupted inside the hotel complex.
The US also assisted in a Somali special forces raid that killed senior militants in the south of the country, according to officials who spoke anonymously to Reuters.
Al Shabaab, which seeks to impose sharia law in Somalia, has been pushed from its southern strongholds by a series of offensives by the African Union force AMISOM and the Somali National Army.
The group has been blamed for attacks in Somalia that have killed global aid workers, journalists, civilian leaders and African Union peacekeepers. All the attackers were killed in the siege that ended early Thursday.
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The militant group, with ties to al Qaeda, said they will give out more details on the attack later.
