The Somali Islamist group al Shabaab killed four people and injured eight others on Thursday (Friday NZ Time) in a mortar attack near the presidential palace in the capital Mogadishu, police and a spokesman for the group said.
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Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, speaking in an interview on a Somali cable TV channel, said Wednesday that between 180 and 200 Kenyan soldiers were killed in the January 15 attack. Al-Shabaab’s attacks in Kenya have included a raid by gunmen on the upscale Westgate shopping mall in 2013 and a university in Garissa in 2015.
Kenya Defence Forces spokesman, Colonel David Obonyo, denied the number given by the Somali president and questioned the source of the information.
The Kenyan government has managed to hide the death toll of the attack because officials reached out to media house editors and asked them not to put out unofficial tolls as this would create fear, an editor with a leading radio station said.
So far, 35 soldiers have been repatriated for burial but al-Shabaab claims to have killed more than 60.
Kenya’s army said the number was untrue, but again refused to give its own casualty figures for the assault in the southern Somali base of el-Ade.
“Secondly, we should stop trivialising the dead”.
Al-Shabaab, which seeks to overthrow Somalia’s Western-backed government, initially said it had killed more than 100 soldiers in the attack.
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Somalia says that nearly 200 Kenyan peacekeepers were killed in an al-Shabaab attack on an African Union military base in Somalia last month in what could be the extremist group’s largest success against the AU mission. The group routinely carries out attacks in Somalia and has launched attacks in countries contributing troops to the AU forces.
