“Our ambulance teams have collected the dead bodies of six people,” said Abdiqadir Abdirahman, director of the city’s Aamin Ambulance service. Six people were killed and another 16 injured when a car bomb exploded outside a local government office in Mogadishu on Monday, Somali police and rescue workers said.
He said 16 others were wounded in the blast. Police officer Ibrahim Mohamed said a vehicle had rammed a security checkpoint outside the Hodan district headquarters then exploded.
“The blast was huge,” he said.
The explosion levelled buildings and left a thick plume of smoke which could be seen across the city. “It caused a huge blast and there was dust everywhere,” said Osman Ali, who was in the area at the time.
Images from the scene showed collapsed buildings — including a mosque — with rescue workers and civilians picking through the debris. Nur Adan, a bystander, told AFP he saw “several dead bodies being recovered from under wreckage” and that the blast had destroyed two local mosques.
The attack was claimed by the Shabaab, an al-Qaeda aligned jihadist group fighting to overthrow the internationally-backed government in Somalia. Active for the last decade, the militants carry out regular bombings and armed assaults on government, military and civilian targets in the capital.
Source: IOL News
