Somalia's weak government sought help on Tuesday in probing the country's first-ever suicide bombing, an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate the interim president that officials pin on al-Qaeda.
Authorities boosted security around the government seat of Baidoa where wreckage from two car bombs, at least one of which was driven by a suicide attacker, still littered the street outside parliament.
In the aftermath of Monday's blasts and an ensuing gunbattle that killed 11 people and wounded 18 but left President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed unscathed, officials said they were convinced al-Qaeda was behind the attack.
PHOTO: AP
And with such accusations flying, tensions soared between the administration in Baidoa and Somalia's powerful hardline Islamist movement that controls much of the south of the country, including the capital Mogadishu.
Meanwhile, neighboring Ethi-opia, a strong ally of Yusuf's government that fears the rise of so-called "jihadists" in Somalia, condemned the attack and vowed "to do whatever is necessary" to protect the administration.
The UN refugee agency said it was concerned that the assassination bid would prompt a new surge in already rising numbers of Somalis crossing the border into Kenya.
Security forces interrogated two presumed attackers captured after Monday's assault, but government spokesman Abdirahman Mohamed Nur Dinari said foreign expertise was needed to investigate the suspected al-Qaeda link.
"Our local investigators are already probing the attack, but we really need international help and expertise in the whole exercise," he said in Baidoa, about 250km northwest of Mogadishu.
If al-Qaeda was involved, "we really do not have the expertise to uncover the [details of the] attack that was well-organized by the same groups that are carrying out attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan," Dinari said.
He said a massive security presence had been deployed in and around Baidoa to search for an unknown number of attackers believed to have escaped in the chaos after the blasts.
Officials stopped short of publicly blaming the Islamists for the incident that killed five members of Yusuf's entourage, including his younger brother, and six attackers, but said privately they appeared to be involved.
"I am sure the Islamic courts are behind it," one senior government source said on condition of anonymity, adding there had been intelligence information from Mogadishu four days earlier about two explosive-laden cars being driven to Baidoa.
"We secured government buildings, but unfortunately we didn't believe that they would hit parliament and target the president," the official said.
Somali Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi blamed the attack on "terrorists" organized within the country that has been wracked by anarchy and without a functioning central administration for the past 16 years.
Other officials say the attack was carried out by the same group responsible for the weekend murder of an elderly Italian nun in Mogadishu, an ambush amid fury over Pope Benedict XVI's comments about Islam.
But in the capital, the Supreme Islamic Council of Somalia (SICS) denied any responsibility for Monday's attack or the nun's slaying, and said they were the work of the "enemies of Somalia."
Some senior members of the Islamist movement, notably its supreme leader Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys who is designated a "terrorist" by the US, have been accused of al-Qaeda ties and harboring extremists.
They deny the charges but US officials maintain that at least three men who participated in the 1998 al-Qaeda bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania are living in Somalia under the protection of the Islamists.
Fears of a Taliban-style takeover of Somalia have been rising since the Islamists seized Mogadishu in June after months of fierce battles with a US-backed alliance of warlords and have since rapidly expanded their territory.
Osama bin Laden himself has hailed the activities of Somali Islamists, praising them for driving out US and UN peacekeepers sent to the lawless Horn of Africa nation in the mid-1990s.
In July, an audiotape attributed to bin Laden warned the world against sending troops to shore up the government's limited authority, something the administration has repeatedly called for over the objections of the Islamists.
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