Death toll from Somalia bomb attacks rises to 300
MORE than 300 people died after twin bomb explosions in Mogadishu, an official said yesterday, as locals packed hospitals in search of friends and relatives caught up in Somalia’s deadliest attack in a decade.
The death toll has steadily risen since Saturday, when the blasts - for which no organisation had claimed responsibility by yesterday morning - struck at two busy junctions in the heart of the city.
“We have confirmed 300 people died in the blast. The death toll will still be higher because some people are still missing,” Abdikadir Abdirahman, the director of the city’s ambulance service, told Reuters yesterday.
Aden Nur, a doctor at the city’s Madina hospital, said they had recorded 258 deaths while Ahmed Ali, a nurse at the nearby Osman Fiqi hospital, told Reuters five bodies had been sent there.
Nur said 160 of the bodies could not be recognised. “(They) were buried by the government on sunday. Their relatives buried the others. Over a hundred injured were also brought here,” he told Reuters at the hospital.
Some of the injured were being evacuated by air to Turkey for treatment, offi- cials said.
Locals visiting their injured relatives or collecting their bodies filled every available space in Madina hospital.
The group is waging an insurgency against Somalia’s United Nations (UN) backed government and its African Union allies in a bid to impose its own strict interpretation of Islam.
The militants were driven out of Mogadishu in 2011 and have been steadily losing territory since then to the combined forces of AU peacekeepers and Somali security forces.
But Al Shabaab retains the capacity to mount large, complex bomb attacks. Over the past three years, the number of civilians killed by insurgent bombings has steadily climbed as al Shabaab increases the size of its bombs.
Some of those seriously injured in Saturday’s bombing were moved by ambulance to the airport yesterday morning to be flown to Turkey for further treatment, Nur added.
Workers unloaded boxes of medicine and other medical supplies from a Turkish military plane parked on the tarmac, while Turkish medical teams attended to the cases of injuries moved from the hospital for evacuation.