Gunmen kill 10 at Somali beach hotel

MOGADISHU, Somalia — Militants detonated a car bomb in front of an upscale hotel in the Somali capital of Mogadishu on Sunday afternoon, then stormed the beachside property. State security forces engaged in a four-hour standoff before killing two attackers who had been holding those inside hostage.

A spokesman for the country’s Information Ministry said the attackers, who belonged to the militant group al-Shabab, killed 10 people. The ministry said 205 others were rescued from the Elite Hotel on Lido Beach.

Abdulkadir Adan, the director of Aamin Ambulance, a private company that is often the first at the scenes of attacks, said 32 injured people had been transported to hospitals, some in critical condition.

“We lost one of our colleagues, named Abdirizak Abdi,” said Ismael Omar, the ministry spokesman. “The blast was huge and followed by gunshots.” He said later that a Defense Ministry employee, Dahir Ali Gawl, was also killed.

Mr. Omar said there were at least four assailants, adding that two were killed at the hotel’s gate and that two had made it inside, armed with automatic rifles.

Abdullahi Mohamed Nor, the hotel’s owner and a member of parliament, wrote on Facebook: “May Allah have mercy upon those who perished in the attack which terrorists carried out at the Elite Hotel . ... I am safe and sound.”

Sieges of hotels are a hallmark tactic of al-Shabab, which claimed Sunday’s attack. The al-Qaida-affiliated armed group controls vast parts of rural Somalia and regularly stages attacks in Somali cities.

In March 2019, al-Shabab fighters held another Mogadishu hotel for 20 hours, killing 25 people and wounding dozens. Three months earlier, the group laid siege to a hotel in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, and killed 21.

The group’s largest recent attack was in December, when it detonated a truck bomb at a busy intersection, killing 82. A week later, it carried out one of its most daring attacks ever, overrunning a military base in Kenya, where gunmen killed a U.S. serviceman and two American military contractors.