Twenty people, most of them Ethiopians, were killed and at least 80 wounded in northeastern Somalia when twin explosions rocked a residential area late on Tuesday, the information ministry said.
"We are very sorry to announce that 20 civilians, most of them Ethiopian citizens, have been killed and 80 others wounded, some of them seriously when violent people targeted them with heavy explosions near the seaport in Bosasso," said Bile Mohamoud Qabowsade, a spokesman for the information ministry in the breakaway region of Puntland.
He said the blasts, apparently caused by grenades, occurred within "two minutes" of each other, razing "an entire neighborhood where the Ethiopian citizens lived."
Bosasso is located in Somalia's self-declared autonomous region of Puntland has become a magnet for migrant workers and economic refugees, many of whom seek to cross the Gulf of Aden to Yemen.
Local staff put the number of wounded higher, saying it was one of the worst attacks in Puntland.
"We received about 90 wounded people and so far some of them died in the hospital. It seems that the hospital had the busiest night and largest number of wounded people in a single incident," said Mohamed Yusuf from Bosasso main hospital.
A witness said that residents were horrified by the carnage left from the explosions.
"We got tired as we collected the charred bodies and seriously injured people through the night," Osman Sheik Weheliye said.
Puntland, which declared semi-autonomy in 1998, has been relatively peaceful compared to Somalia, which has been wracked by violence since former dictator Mohamed Siad Barre was ousted in 1991.
Ethiopian troops are currently in Somalia, propping up the weak interim government that has been fighting the remnants of an Islamist militia that briefly controlled parts of the country in 2006.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS