A Somali warlord said on Friday his gunmen have fired heavy artillery shells towards the closed seaport in Mogadishu to scare away two foreign vessels that have been trying to dock there.
The shells were fired late on Thursday and early on Friday when the privately owned MV Star and MV Bilal, which had sailed from the United Arab Emirates, tried to anchor, said Mohamed Abdi Bebe, a warlord who controls pockets of northern Mogadishu.
”I ordered the firing of the weapons towards the port because the facility is still officially closed. No agreement between the concerned factions has been reached to open the facility,” he said.
”Any vessel attempting to dock at the port is doing so on its own risk. The reasons of the port closure was disagreement over sharing of revenue and that conflict is still alive,” Bebe explained.
The port was shut down in 1995, when United Nations peacekeepers left the country, after rival factions failed to develop a formula for sharing revenue from the facility.
Somalia has lacked an effective central government since the 1991 ousting of dictator Mohammed Siad Barre split the vast desert country of about 10-million people into a patchwork of fiefdoms governed by unruly warlords.
A government named early this month is still based in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, because of still-widespread insecurity in Mogadishu. — Sapa-AFP