Celebratory gunfire erupted in the Somali capital late on Thursday on the release from jail of Mogadishu’s police chief, who was arrested in Sweden this week on suspicion of genocide.
Militiamen in control of the bullet-scarred city unleashed a torrent of anti-aircraft artillery and machine gun fire into the sky after Colonel Abdi Hassan Awlae Qeybdid confirmed reports of his release in a live radio interview.
”I would like to thank the Somali leaders and people for the passionate appeals for my release,” he told Mogadishu’s Shabelle radio from Sweden shortly after he walked free from four days in detention.
On Wednesday, thousands of people had demonstrated in the city, angrily denouncing President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed and demanding the release of Qeybdid, who was arrested on Monday in the southern Swedish city of Lund while attending an international conference.
Qeybdid and his supporters blamed the arrest on Yusuf, who heads a deeply divided transitional government established last year with the aim of restoring a functioning central authority to the country wracked by 14 years of anarchy.
”Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed was clearly responsible for my arrest,” he said in the radio interview, promising to hold a news conference in Stockholm on Friday to discuss details.
Qeybdid was freed after a Swedish court rejected a prosecutor’s request to keep him in custody due to a lack of evidence that he was inolved in war crimes in the southern Somali port town of Kismayo in 1991.
”I was accused of killing or massacring Somali Darod clan members in my country,” he told Shabelle radio. ”That is not true. I did not kill anybody or order the killing of anyone. The Darods are my Somali brothers.”
Under Sweden’s ”universal jurisdiction” law, Swedish courts can try suspects for genocide committed abroad, but Qeybdid’s lawyer Thomas Olsson told the Swedish news agency TT that the evidence against his client ”was based purely on rumours and speculation”.
A special prosecutor for international cases, Mats Saellstroem, said he would not appeal the court’s decision. ”I see no further evidence in sight,” he said.
Swedish police arrested Qeybdid on a tip from a Somali refugee in Sweden that he had committed genocide in Kismayo.
But the 57-year-old Somali is perhaps better known for helping to lead battles against US troops attempting to arrest the late warlord Mohamad Farah Aidid in Mogadishu in 1993.
In events depicted in the Hollywood film Black Hawk Down, the US operation went wrong from the outset and ended with battles in the capital in which hundreds of Somalis and 18 US special forces troops were killed.
Aidid’s son, Hussein Mohammed Aidid, a dissident minister in Yusuf’s government, called Qeybdid’s arrest a ”gross miscalculation” that could lead to renewed bloodshed.
Yusuf’s administration is split in two with one faction headed by him based in the town of Jowhar north of the capital, and the other, to which the younger Aidid and Qeybdid belong, based in Mogadishu.
Repeated efforts to mediate an end to their disputes have failed and raised fears of new large-scale violence. – Sapa-AFP