Somalia’s security minister was among 20 people killed on Thursday in the country’s deadliest suicide bombing, an attack claimed by the country’s hardline Islamist rebels.
The blast, which ripped through a hotel in Beledweyne, near the Ethiopian border, killed Minister Omar Hashi Aden and 19 others, including several government officials in his entourage, elders and witnesses said.
About 30 people were wounded in the attack, officials said.
The attack followed a day of fierce clashes on Wednesday between Islamist insurgents and government forces that killed at least 26 people in Mogadishu, including the capital’s police commander.
Abdi Sheikh Guled, a local elder in Beledweyne, said the death toll in Beledweyne had reached 20 including “top government officials and security forces who were guarding the minister.”
The head of the pro-government Islamic Courts militia, Ibrahim Maow, told reporters in Beledweyne that Somalia’s former ambassador to Ethiopia, Abdulkarim Ibrahim Lakanyo, was also among the dead.
The suicide bomber drove an explosives-laden Toyota car up to the Hotel Medina as the minister and his delegation were preparing to leave, hotel worker Ahmed Abdi said.
The blast, which badly damaged the hotel, left a thick pall of smoke over the town, about 300km north of Mogadishu. Witnesses saw charred bodies among the debris.
The radical Islamic Shebab said one of its “holy warriors” had carried out the suicide attack.
“One of our Mujahedeens went with his car laden with explosives to a building where the apostate and other members from his group had been meeting,” Shebab spokesman Sheikh Ali Mohamoud Rage told reporters in Mogadishu.
“The apostates have been eliminated, they all died in the suicide attack,” he said.
Somalia’s embattled President Sharif Sheikh Ahmed blamed the attack on foreign “terrorists who do not want the Somali flag to fly over this nation.”
Sharif, a moderate, has repeatedly warned of a risk of al-Qaeda setting up a “strategic zone” for its network in Somalia by backing the Shebab.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion