Truck bomb kills at least 90 in Mogadishu
At least 90 people were killed when a bomb-laden truck exploded at a busy checkpoint in the Somali capital Mogadishu yesterday, an international organisation working in the country said, in the deadliest attack in more than two years.
The dead included many students and two Turkish nationals, Somalia’s foreign minister said, adding that dozens were injured.
The explosion occurred during the morning rush hour.
Rescuers carried bodies past the twisted wreckage of a vehicle and a minibus taxi smeared with blood.
A report by the international organisation, which did not want to be named, said the death toll was more than 90 and that university students and 17 police officers were among those killed.
A Somali MP also tweeted that he had been told the death toll stands at more than 90.
Like other checkpoints in a city scarred by decades of conflict, traffic is often clogged at the Ex-Control Junction, where heavily armed security forces check vehicles for explosives and weapons and other officers direct traffic.
There is also a government tax collection point at junction, officials said.
No-one immediately claimed responsibility for the blast but the city’s mayor blamed Al Qaeda-linked Islamist group Al Shebaab.
The group regularly carries out such attacks in an attempt to undermine the government, which is backed by the United Nations and African Union peacekeeping troops.
The most deadly attack blamed on Al Shebaab was in October 2017 when a bomb-laden truck exploded next to a fuel tanker in Mogadishu, creating a
fireball that killed nearly 600 people.
While Al Shebaab carries out frequent attacks, the death tolls are often lower than in yesterday’s blast.
The group has sometimes not claimed responsibility for attacks that sparked a big public backlash, such as a 2009 suicide bombing of a graduation ceremony for medical students.
A number of attacks this year, including one in September on a base where US special forces train Somali commandos, show the group maintains a strong intelligence network and can mount deadly and sometimes sophisticated operations, analysts say.
Three witnesses told Reuters that a small team of Turkish engineers were present at the time of the blast, constructing a road into the city.
Turkey has been a major donor to Somalia since a famine in 2011, and together with the government of Qatar is funding a number of infrastructure and medical projects in the country.
Her ears still ringing from the deafening sound of an explosion near her home in the Somali capital yesterday morning, 18-year-old Qali Ibrahim frantically dialled her husband’s mobile phone.
Minutes earlier he had left home, hammer and saw in hand, headed out for a day of construction work.
“The number you are dialling is not reachable”, his mobile responded.
Hours of anguish would pass before she could confirm her worst nightmare, Ibrahim later recounted.
From hospital to hospital, there was no word of Muktar Abukar, a 35-yearold homebuilder whom she married four months earlier. At Mogadishu’s biggest hospital, Medina, she and her sister-in-law were told to look among a row of dead bodies that had not yet been identified after a huge truck bomb blast.
Ibrahim said she pulled back the sheet on the first corpse she came to, finding a badly burned body she recognised as her husband’s from a deep scar on one of his fingers.
“We were together last night,” the new widow, three months pregnant, wept as she rocked back and forth, her head veiled by a red scarf and buried between her knees as her sister-in-law squeezed her shoulders. “The world is so painful.”