Somalia: 5 Islamic militants attack hotel in capital, kill 6
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Version 0 of 1. NAIROBI — Five Islamist extremists attacked a leading hotel in Somalia’s capital at dawn on Sunday, killing at least six people and injuring 10, before security forces killed the assailants. Somali troops and African Union forces ended the siege by the al-Shabab attackers at the Sahafi Hotel by midday, police commander Ali Ahmed said. “It’s over now. We have killed all the attackers,” Ahmed said by telephone. “They came under cover of darkness and attacked the hotel while some of the guards were sleeping.” The attack started at daybreak when a suicide bomber detonated an explosives-laden vehicle at the hotel’s entrance and then four men, armed with AK-47 rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and suicide vests, invaded the premises. Some of them went into rooms to kill occupants while others went to the rooftop to fight off government soldiers who came to stop them, said Capt. Mohamed Hussein, a senior Somali police officer. A second explosion came from a car bomb outside the hotel, witnesses said. Among those killed was the hotel’s owner and a former military general, Hussein said. “Had it not been for the courage of some of the hotel residents who fought back the terrorists, the death toll could have been a lot higher than it is now,” Hussein said. “They came in firing bullets randomly and chanting ‘God is great’ — they shot anyone they could see,” said a hotel resident, Ahmed Abdulle. Al-Shabab, the Islamist extremist group waging an insurgency against Somalia’s weak government, asserted responsibility for the attack in a statement delivered on the group’s radio station, Andalus. One photographer was among those killed and another was injured, according to witnesses. “I was at the scene of the explosion, busy taking photos, when a vehicle full of explosives exploded beside me. I fell on the ground and saw part of my body bleeding. I was with another journalist who was killed in the attack,” said Feisal Omar, who has since been discharged from the Mogadishu hospital. The Sahafi Hotel is frequented by Somali government officials and business executives, and it has been targeted before. Two French security advisers were abducted from the hotel by militants in 2009. Despite being forced out of Mogadishu and many other cities and towns across Somalia, al-Shabab continues to launch lethal attacks in the capital and elsewhere. Al-Shabab is fighting to oust the Mogadishu government and install a strict version of sharia, or Islamic law. Al-Shabab has also attacked neighboring countries that have sent troops to support the Mogadishu government, which is backed by the United Nations. The extremists killed 148 people in an attack on a college in Garissa, Kenya, in April. Sunday’s attack was condemned by Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud. “This is the action of an increasingly desperate, internally divided group of extremists . . . [who] seek to grab the headlines through killing innocent Muslims.” Mohamud urged Somalis “to prevent extremists from distorting the faith of our fathers. . . . We must do this by confronting their warped ideology and liberating Somalia from them entirely.” — Associated Press |