Three die in Nato helicopter tragedy
AT LEAST six people have been killed, including two children, after a suicide bomber detonated an explosives-laden vehicle outside a district headquarters in Somalia’s capital.
Captain Mohamed Hussein said the bomber tried to speed through a checkpoint but was stopped by security forces, prompting him to detonate the vehicle near the gate of Howlwadag district headquarters in Mogadishu.
The three soldiers who stopped the truck were killed instantly and the three others killed were civilians, said the Mogadishu mayor’s spokesman Salah Hassan Omar.
Fourteen people, including six children, need intensive care, said the Aamin ambulance service.
Among the wounded was deputy district commissioner Ibrah Hassan Matan.
Many victims were students at a nearby Islamic school.
Officials warned there could be more casualties as the blast brought down nearby buildings, including a mosque.
“I saw bodies strewn on the ground after the explosion before the ambulances and the paramedics reached the scene and the whole scene was very ugly,” witness Halima Mohamed said.
The attacker “literally failed to achieve their goal of inflicting maximum casualties”, Capt Hussein said, accusing the al Qaidalinked extremist group al-Shabab of carrying out the attack.
Al-Shabab later claimed responsibility for the explosion, which shattered a period of calm in seaside Mogadishu.
The Somalia-based al-Shabab often targets the capital with bombings, including a truck bombing in October that left at least 512 people dead.
Somali troops are meant to take over the Horn of Africa nation’s security in the coming years from an African Union force but concerns about their readiness remain.
The UN Security Council recently voted to delay the reduction of troops in the AU force from October to February and the target date to hand over security to Somali forces to December 2021.
Meanwhile, an air strike by a Saudi-led coalition that killed dozens of people in Yemen last month is an apparent war crime, an international rights group said.
The coalition fighting Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthi rebels has expressed its regret and pledged to hold to account those responsible for the air strike, which hit a bus carrying children in a busy market.
At least 51 people, including 40 children, were killed and 79 others, including 56 children, were wounded in the air strike.
Human Rights Watch said the attack adds to the coalition’s “already gruesome track record of killing civilians at weddings, funerals, hospitals and schools in Yemen”.
It has urged countries to “immediately halt weapons sales” to Saudi Arabia. Yemen’s civil war has been raging since 2015. The New York-based group said it spoke by phone to 14 witnesses.
A foreign pilot and two Afghan soldiers were killed when a helicopter contracted by Nato crashed inside an army base, an Afghan official has said.
Army spokesman Major Hanif Rezaie said three others, including another foreign pilot, were wounded when the MI-14 helicopter crashed shortly after takeoff from the base near the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif.