At least three people including a child were killed yesterday in a car bomb blast outside a restaurant in the capital Mogadishu, officials and witnesses said.
“There was an explosion against a restaurant in the Beyhani district. Three civilians were killed and five others injured,” said Abdifatah Halane, a spokesman for the Banadir province which includes the capital.
Witnesses told AFP that the car, packed with explosives, was parked just outside the restaurant, and produced a massive blast.
“The explosion was enormous... I saw several corpses, including one of a child,” said one witness, Farhan Mohamed.
Several sources told AFP that the restaurant, which is in the northern part of the city, was regularly used by Somali security forces, although it was unclear if any were there at the time.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack, but the Al-Qaeda-linked Shebaab militant group regularly mounts car bomb attacks and assassinations on government targets.
They have also stepped up deadly attacks in recent months on restaurants and some of Mogadishu’s most high-profile hotels.
Separately, two Shebaab militants were executed yesterday by firing squad Saturday for the murder of a journalist killed by a car bomb last year, a judge said.
Abdirisak Mohamed Barow and Hassan Nur Ali, who admitted being Shebaab members during their trial, were shot yesterday morning in Mogadishu, Abdulahi Hussein Mohamed, deputy judge of the supreme military court told reporters.
“Both of them were found guilty of murdering journalist Hindiyo Haji Mohamed whose car was blown with explosive device,” Hussein said.
National television journalist Mohamed was killed in December when his car blew up as he returned home from a university class in Mogadishu.
The military court recently rejected an appeal by the men - and indeed increased their sentence from life imprisonment to execution.
Somalia is one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists to operate, with some attacks believed to be linked to score-settling among the multiple factions in power, as well as by the Shebaab.
The Reporters Without Borders press freedom campaign group ranks Somalia 172nd out of 180 countries for press freedom. Mohamed was the 38th journalist killed doing his job in the country since 2010, the group says.
Shebaab rebels have carried out repeated attacks in Somalia and neighbouring Kenya as part of their fight to overthrow the country’s internationally-backed government, as well as the African Union troops supporting it, which include Kenyan soldiers.
Shebaab leaders have vowed to bring down the Somali government, which is supported by the international community and defended by the African Union’s 22,000-strong AMISOM mission.
Confronted with AMISOM’s superior fire power, deployed from 2007, Shebaab militants were chased out of Mogadishu in August 2011. The group subsequently lost its main strongholds, although it still controls vast rural areas from which it mounts guerrilla operations and suicide attacks, often targeting the capital.
People stand around the debris at the site of a car bomb blast outside a Mogadishu restaurant.
