/ 18 June 2009

Somali security minister killed in suicide bombing

Somalia’s internal security minister was among 10 people killed on Thursday in a suicide bombing at a hotel in Beledweyne, north of the capital, said management at the hotel who witnessed the blast told.

Hotel worker Ahmed Abdi said up to 13 people could have died in the attack, staged at the hotel where Security Minister Omar Hashi Aden was staying with his entourage.

”His body is lying at the reception,” he said.

Abdi said the suicide bomber drove an explosives-laden Toyota saloon car up to the hotel as the minister and his delegation was preparing to leave.

Witnesses said the blast destroyed much of the hotel and left a thick pall of smoke over the town, about 300km north of the capital.

Blackened corpses were visible among the debris, they said.

Mohamed Abdi, a shopkeeper near the hotel, said smoke was rising from the building, government forces started shooting after the blast and body parts were scattered in the street.

A local Islamic official confirmed the minister’s death, and told reporters that Somalia’s former ambassador to Ethiopia, Abdulkarim Ibrahim Lakanyo, was among the dead.

Aden’s killing was the most high-profile political assassination in Somalia since Islamist insurgents stepped up a campaign against the wobbly administration of President Sharif Sheikh Ahmed on May 7.

It follows that of Mogadishu’s top police commander, killed on Wednesday when at least 26 people lost their lives in the capital, half of them when a mortar shell hit a mosque.

Ahmed is a former Islamist rebel who joined a UN-brokered peace process last year and was elected by Parliament in January. His government forces have been battling hardline Islamist al-Shabaab since early May.

More than 122 000 people have since been displaced, bringing the total number of war refugees in the country to 1,3-million, according to UN figures.

Aden moved to Baladwayne at the start of June with heavily armed troops in a bid to recapture more territory from hardline Islamist insurgents outside Mogadishu. — AFP, Reuters