Members of a heavily armed Somali gang occupying a desecrated colonial-era Italian cemetery in Mogadishu said on Tuesday they will build a mosque at the site.
The gunmen have already begun started to erect residential structures on the cemetery grounds in bullet-scarred Mogadishu’s southern Suka Hola neighbourhood, and one said construction will soon begin on a mosque.
”We plan to build a mosque here,” he said, speaking to a reporter several metres from the cemetery, now strewn with dirt, broken tombstones and shattered coffins.
The site is guarded by nearly 100 heavily armed men backed by machine-gun-mounted pick-up trucks and is out of bounds to ordinary Somalis.
Gunmen, allegedly under orders from Islamic courts, exhumed the remains of hundreds of Italian nationals buried at the cemetery nearly 50 years ago and discarded them into trash-dumping zones along the shores of the Indian Ocean.
Well-wishers have since collected the exhumed remains and stored them in an unknown place, pending a decision on what to do with them.
Residents of the neighbourhood said at the time that the gunmen told them they had been ordered to cleanse the site of non-Islamic elements, while others said the remains were removed to clear the grounds for housing.
However, Muslim clerics have denied any involvement in the incident.
Mogadishu’s self-proclaimed and largely powerless ”mayor”, Ibrahim Shawe, expressed outrage at plans to build a mosque on the graveyard.
”We have plenty of land that we can build mosques, but the land on which the cemetery is located is legally owned by Italy,” he said. ”You can’t build a religious building on a piece of land that has been confiscated by force.”
Shawe has made several unsuccessful attempts to evict the gunmen from the site.
Last week’s exhumations sparked howls of protest from Rome and the Roman Catholic Church, and Somalia’s transitional government, based in Nairobi for security reasons, formally apologised on Saturday.
On Monday, a group opposed to the violent take-over of the graveyard demonstrated in Mogadishu condemning what is believed to be the first-ever desecration of a Christian cemetery in the lawless country.
The Islamic nation of about 10-million people has been a theatre of anarchic bloodletting since dictator Mohamed Siad Barre was toppled in 1991, paving way for a rapid collapse of tools of statehood and instruments of governance. — Sapa-AFP