A car explosion killed at least four people in the restive Somali capital on Sunday as three others, including a policeman, were gunned down in violence which has surged since the toppling of an Islamist movement late last year.
Police said the four traveling in the car were all killed when their vehicle exploded in Mogadishu's Tawfiiq neighborhood.
Police official Garad Jama said investigators were probing the cause of the explosion, which also injured four bystanders.
"We are still not sure what caused this explosion," Jama said.
Mogadishu has seen a rise in violence since an Islamist movement, which seized Mogadishu from warlords who had lawlessly ruled the capital, was driven out last December by government forces backed by Ethiopian troops.
In a separate incident, masked attackers fired on a police patrol vehicle, killing an officer and wounding two others, in the northern Eymiska district, witnesses said.
"Policemen were driving when gunmen in another car opened fire on them ... one of the policemen was killed on the spot and two others wounded," local resident Ahmed Sheik Muhidin said.
Hours later, two people were killed and three wounded when government forces came under fire from unidentified gunmen.
"Heavy fire was exchanged and two people, one of them a woman, was killed," said a witness, Zakariye Mohamed.
On Saturday, at least one person was killed and 12 others injured when a mortar shell landed on a camp housing displaced people in the capital's port area.
Residents have rallied to protest the presence of the Ethiopian troops, some of whom began withdrawing last month.
The Islamists, who brought a semblance of order in Mogadishu and other areas they controlled in central and southern Somalia, have disbanded into clan militia. But some of them have vowed to fight the government and a planned African Union peacekeeping force.
Thousands gathered across New Zealand yesterday to celebrate the signing of the country’s founding document and some called for an end to government policies that critics say erode the rights promised to the indigenous Maori population. As the sun rose on the dawn service at Waitangi where the Treaty of Waitangi was first signed between the British Crown and Maori chiefs in 1840, some community leaders called on the government to honor promises made 185 years ago. The call was repeated at peaceful rallies that drew several hundred people later in the day. “This government is attacking tangata whenua [indigenous people] on all
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
BACK TO BATTLE: North Korean soldiers have returned to the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region after earlier reports that Moscow had withdrawn them following heavy losses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pored over a once-classified map of vast deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals as part of a push to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s penchant for a deal. The US president, whose administration is pressing for a rapid end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, on Monday said he wanted Ukraine to supply the US with rare earths and other minerals in return for financially supporting its war effort. “If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskiy said, emphasizing Ukraine’s need for security guarantees