Somalia’s most powerful Islamist insurgents, al-Shabab, executed two teenage girls on Wednesday after deciding they were spies, setting off fears among residents, officials and witnesses said.
The two teenagers — one 18 and the other 14 — were shot by a firing squad in the center of the town of Beledweyne, near the border with Ethiopia, witnesses said.
Pickup trucks with big loudspeakers drove into the town, ordering the residents to watch the execution. Residents were also told to switch off their cellphones and were warned not to take pictures, a prohibition that has been enforced at some Islamist executions in the past.
“The teenage girls were executed in the regional headquarters at the center of the town. Some of the women who were watching fainted at the scene,” witness Abukar Elmi said. “This is a shocking event.”
The al-Shabab official in the town, Sheik Yusuf Ali Ugas, told local journalists that “the two girls were found guilty of spying for the Ethiopian government.”
Ethiopia invaded Somalia in 2006 to oust an Islamist movement that had taken control of much of the country, including the capital, Mogadishu.
Thousands of Ethiopian soldiers remained in Somalia for the next three years before withdrawing and some of the Somali government forces fighting the al-Shabab in the Beledweyne area are supported by the Ethiopian government.
Ugas said the teenagers were not the only ones in al-Shabab custody, adding: “There are many people now in al-Shabab prisons in Beledweyne.”
He also sent a warning to Ethiopia, saying that the al-Shabab knew “all the informants serving for the Ethiopian government.”
Townspeople argued that the two teenage girls were innocent.
The girls, they said, were traveling away from their families when they were caught in a crossfire just outside Beledweyne, where both government forces and the al-Shabab are positioned.
Many Somalis try to reach Yemen and Saudi Arabia to find better opportunities there and escape from the violence in the country.
“When the fighting started between the Shabab and the government forces just outside Beledweyne, the girls had to flee to the bush, where they were finally caught,” said a resident whose name was withheld for his safety. “I think they were executed because they were caught at the front line.”
The Somali transitional federal government strongly condemned the public execution, arguing that the two girls had not been given the right to a legal defense, nor had their parents even been informed.
“This execution is yet another human rights abuse committed by the criminals,” the Somali government said. “This act of -killing innocent children does not have Islamic and humanitarian justifications.”
Al-Shabab have been responsible for many human rights violations in the areas they control. In 2008, for instance, they stoned to death a rape victim in the port town of Kismayo.
Al-Shabab, who control most of south and central Somalia, have imposed a strict interpretation of Islam that includes stoning adulterers, amputating the extremities of thieves and banning things such as televisions, school bells and bras.
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