At least three police officers died when a auto bomb exploded outside a tea shop in the Somali capital Mogadishu on Wednesday, police said.
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The Pentagon has said USA forces carried out air strikes on a training camp run by al-Shabab, killing more than 150 of the group’s fighters on Saturday. A spokesman for the group told Reuters that 10 police officers were killed, a figure that was higher than the three deaths police reported.
African Union ground forces and U.S. missile attacks have simply not been able to obliterate the al-Qaida-linked group, which the U.S. State Department declared a terrorist organization in 2008 and has proven to be resilient.
Intelligence indicated the group was training for some time and was in the final stages of getting ready to conduct a “large-scale attack”, Davis said.
The Pentagon initially characterized the attack as a drone strike, but later clarified that the operation involved both manned and unmanned aircraft.
Davis says the training camp, about 120 miles north of Mogadishu, was destroyed.
Police said a second device went off, but caused no casualties after police spotted it beforehand and caught two men in the small, three-wheeled vehicle.
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Despite being ousted Mogadishu and surrounding regions, al-Shabab continues to launch guerrilla attacks across the Horn of Africa country. Al-Shabab, which traditionally has operated in southern Somalia, has even expanded its operations northward into the central region of Galmudug and the semiautonomous region of Puntland, he said.
