BLAST KILLS 78 IN SOMALIA
Busy area in Mogadishu targeted by terrorists; among the dead were university students, Turkish nationals
MOGADISHU : A massive car bomb exploded in a busy area of Mogadishu on Saturday, leaving at least 78 people dead, many of them university students, in Somalia’s deadliest attack in two years. The blast occurred at a busy intersection southwest of the Somali capital where the presence of a security checkpoint and a tax office often cause traffic jams. The attack has not been claimed by any entity yet.
MOGADISHU: A massive car bomb exploded in a busy area of Mogadishu on Saturday, leaving at least 78 people dead, many of them university students, in Somalia’s deadliest attack in two years.
The blast occurred at a busy intersection southwest of the Somali capital where the presence of a security checkpoint and a tax office often cause traffic jams.
Scores of wounded were carried on stretchers from the site, where the force of the explosion left the charred and twisted remains of vehicles.
The attack has not been claimed by any entity. However, Mogadishu is regularly hit by car bombings and attacks waged by al-Shabaab Islamist militants allied to Al-Qaeda.
President Mohamed Abdullahi Farmaajo condemned the attack in comments carried by the Somalia national news agency SONNA.
“This enemy works to implement the destructive will of international terrorism, they have never done anything positive for this our country,” he said. “All they do is destruction and killing and the Somali public are well informed about this.”
Many of those killed are believed to be university students whose bus was hit by the blast. Two Turkish nationals also died, police said.
“The number of the dead from the blast is still increasing, we now have 78 dead and 125 injured,” the director of the private Aamin Ambulance service, Abdukadir Abdirahman Haji, told AFP.
Turkey’s defence ministry wrote on Twitter it had sent a military plane “loaded with emergency aid equipment... in order to provide emergency aid to our Somalian brothers injured in the despicable terror attack in Somalia”.
Sakariye Abdukadir, who was near the area when the car bomb detonated, said the blast “destroyed several of my car windows. All I could see was scattered dead bodies.”