Bartamaha (Nairobi):-Ten Somali anti-government fighters have been killed by their own bombs after the devices they were preparing went off prematurely in the capital, Mogadishu, the government says.

The mostly foreign fighters died in two separate incidents, 10 while preparing a car bomb and another as he planted a roadside bomb, the information ministry said on Saturday.

“They are three Pakistanis, two Indians, one Afghani, one Algerian, and two Somalis, [and] a leader who was in charge of praying for suicide bombers before they were dispatched,” the ministry said in a statement.

Al-Shabab has yet to react to the transitional government’s claim.

Witnesses said heavily armed men belonging to al-Shabab, a group alleged by US officials to have al-Qaeda links, cordoned off the area, preventing people from reaching the scene.

“We don’t know what caused the explosions but the house where it hit has totally collapsed and I saw one burned body … under the rubble,” Adan Yusuf, a witness, said.

Another witness, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said everybody had heard the loud explosions but dozens of al-Shabab fighters had barred access so it was not possible to know how many casualties there were.

Al-Shabab and another group have been fighting Somalia’s UN-backed government since the start of 2007, launching frequent attacks on its bases in the capital.

Police arrested two men who had been guarding the fighters digging a hole at a Mogadishu bridge for the roadside bomb and confiscated a bag with materials for making explosives.

Al-Shabab, which controls much of the capital in a country deprived of an effective central government for nearly two decades, has adopted Taliban-like governance in the Horn of Africa nation that has been unstable since 1991.

More than 21,000 Somalis have been killed in fighting since the start of the insurgency, 1.5 million have been uprooted from their homes and nearly half a million are sheltering in other countries in the region.

———————————————

Source:-Aljazeera.

Comments

comments