At least 10 people were killed and more than 40 were injured Wednesday after gunmen and a suicide bomber attacked a popular hotel in Somalia’s capital of Mogadishu.
Advertisement
In February, at least nine people were killed when al-Shabab fighters set off a auto bomb at the gate of a popular park near another hotel in Mogadishu.
A Somali soldier responds to the Ambassador Hotel bombing in Mogadishu, Somalia.
With gunfire clattering inside, security forces are trying to clear the hotel and help those who have been stranded.
A witness heard a man on the hotel’s top floor crying out: “Please rescue me”.
The area is lined with hotels, restaurants and banks in the heart of the capital that links another major artery to the presidential palace.
Al Shabaab was pushed out of Mogadishu by African Union peacekeeping forces in 2011.
Dulyadeyn was killed in an overnight assault on an al-Shabaab stronghold in Bulo Gadud, a village 19 miles from the southern port of Kismayo on Tuesday night, according to Abdirashid Hassan Abdi, a regional security minister.
Mohamed Mohamud, better known as Dulyadeyn, was head of al-Shabab’s feared “Amniyat” unit and masterminded the April 2015 attack on the college that left 148 people dead, almost all of them students.
The US has also sent special forces into Somalia to assist government troops against al-Shabaab, which has affiliated itself with al-Qaida and staged terrorist attacks in Somalia and Kenya for years.
The Garissa attack was the deadliest in Kenya since the Al-Qaeda bombing of the United States embassy in 1998 and was carried out by four gunmen, all of whom died. The group has also been behind deadly attacks in Kenya and Uganda.
Separately Wednesday, Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook said a senior Shabaab military commander, Abdullahi Haji Da’ud, was “presumed killed” following a USA air strike on May 27. During the raid, 147 people, mostly students, were killed in the eastern town of Garissa near the Somali border. We killed many of them inside and we shall give details later.
One of them died in the bomb blast, while the other two were killed by the Somali police.
The building was extensively damaged during the attack and government forces had blocked off all the main roads near the scene.
Although not nominally at war in any African nation, the USA has steadily increased military action on the continent in the wake of mass terror attacks like the one at Garissa University.
Advertisement
There is a small American military presence in Somalia to advise and assist that country’s new military and African Union in Somalia forces (AMISOM) targeting the terror group al-Shabaab that once ruled the country.
