Students, police among 79 dead in Somalia blast
Print Edition
A TRUCK bomb exploded at a busy security checkpoint in Somalia’s capital Mogadishu on Saturday, killing at least 79 people including many students, authorities said. It was the worst attack since the devastating 2017 bombing that killed hundreds.
The explosion ripped through rush hour as Somalia returned to work after weekend. At least 125 people were wounded, Aamin Ambulance service director Abdiqadir Abdulrahman said, and hundreds of Mogadishu residents donated blood after desperate appeals.
President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed condemned the attack as a “heinous act of terror” and blamed the al-Shabab extremist group, which is linked to al-Qaida and whose reach has extended to deadly attacks on luxury malls and schools in Kenya.
Bodies lay on the ground amid the blackened skeletons of vehicles. At a hospital, families and friends picked through dozens of the dead, gingerly lifting sheets to peer at faces.
Most of those killed were university students returning to class and police officers, said Somalia’s police chief General Abdi Hassan Hijar. He said the vehicle detonated after police at the checkpoint blocked it from proceeding into the city.
Somalis mourned the deaths of so many young people in a country trying to rebuild itself after decades of conflict. Two Turkish brothers were among the dead, Somalia’s foreign minister said, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan condemned the attack.
Al-Shabab is now able to make its own explosives, its “weapon of choice,” United Nations experts monitoring sanctions on Somalia said earlier this year. The group had previously relied on military-grade explosives captured from African Union peacekeeping force.
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