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.
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