Witnesses said an explosion killed at least 15 people in the Somali capital on Sunday, amid a political crisis that has threatened the government’s peace deal with elements of an Islamic insurgency.
Salah Adde said a bomb hidden under a pile of garbage exploded on a main road and 15 people were killed, including 10 women street cleaners.
”It was an ugly scene with blood everywhere,” said another witness, Farah Abdi. ”I could not count the dead, I just glanced at once and I ran away for my life.”
Medina hospital admitted 35 wounded people, most women and children and many in critical condition, hospital head Dahir Dhere said.
The explosion followed last month’s peace agreement, which has fuelled power struggles within both the transitional government and the Islamic insurgency it is fighting.
In a separate attack, Islamic insurgents overnight targeted the military bases of Somali government troops and their Ethiopian allies in north Mogadishu’s Towfiq neighbourhood.
Resident Mohamed Deq said he saw the bodies of three government soldiers lying in the street.
The attacks end a period of relative calm that followed the signing of the peace deal, which is on shaky ground after 10 of the United Nations-backed transitional government’s 15 ministers broke with the prime minister on Saturday and announced they would resign.
The peace agreement was already in jeopardy, after the moderate cleric who signed it on behalf of the Islamic opposition movement was replaced by hard-liner Sheik Hassan Dahir Aweys, who has rejected the deal.
Somalia has been at war since a group of warlords overthrew a socialist dictator in 1991 and then spent years fighting each other. In 2006, Aweys led Islamist insurgents to take the capital and much of the south, but they were driven out at the end of the year.
The Islamists launched an Iraq-style insurgency that has killed thousands of Somalis and driven hundreds of thousands from their home.
The UN estimates half the population on the arid Horn of Africa nation will be dependent on food aid by the end of the year. — Sapa-AP