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“What happened today was an Al-Qaeda masterminded terrorist attack against me and the terrorists wanted to discourage the government and Somali nation, but they will never succeed,” Gedi told local media.
“Six of my security men were killed in the explosion and I am right now with other officials in my compound,” he said, revising upwards a previous death toll of four.
The explosion, against Gedi’s residence in the north of the capital, followed a deadly weekend assault in northeastern Somalia by security forces and a US warship against Islamic extremists with suspected links to Al-Qaeda.
A neighbour who declined to be named said the bomber rammed his car into the gates of Gedi’s property, and then the blast shook the area.
“The explosion was very huge and could be heard in a long distance,” Abdi Salam Ali, another neighbour, told AFP.
“This was an attack against the prime minister. This is the work of anti-peace elements who want to terrorise the Somali people,” government spokesman Abdullahi Muhidin said, vowing that the perpetrators “shall be hunted and brought to justice.”
It was the fourth time in a year that Gedi has been the target of assassination attempts.
On May 17 a roadside explosion went off as his convoy drove past. Before that, he was the target of two other bomb attacks in November and May last year.
The daytime assault on Gedi’s house underlined the precarious control Somalia’s transitional government — which is supported by Ethiopian troops and African Union peacekeepers — has over Mogadishu and elsewhere since ousting an Islamic extremist movement.
The capital has been prey to violence since warlords ousted the previous administration of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991.
Some 1,250 kilometres (780 miles) northeast of Mogadishu, in Somalia’s semi-autonomous region of Puntland, security forces backed by a US Navy destroyer attacked a mountainous zone believed to host Al-Qaeda and other extremist bases.
At least 12 Islamists were killed in the assault near the town of Bargal, which raged from Friday to early Saturday, Puntland military officials said.
Some residents said there were civilian casualties in the operation.
According to a CNN report, the US naval destroyer was targeting a suspected Al-Qaeda operative linked to the 1998 attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
The vessel fired missiles overnight Friday after Puntland forces chased the Islamist fighters into the hilly areas, residents said.
A Puntland military commander who requested anonymity claimed the Islamists were crushed by the Somali forces before the US destroyer fired its missiles.
“Their bodies are lying in the mountainous area and we hope to show them to the media. They (the Islamists) have lost in the battle and we killed 12 of them,” he said.
Puntland Finance Minister Mohamed Ali Yusuf told reporters that “our forces are fully controlling Bargal.”
He claimed that recovered documents showed the “terrorists (were) from America, Britain, Sweden, Morocco, Pakistan and Yemen.”
He added that five Somali fighters were wounded in the assault.
Residents said the US missiles wounded at least 15 people.
“The casualty (number) could be far higher than we think. But so far, we have been told that 15 people were injured in the attack and some of them are nomad civilians,” said a local from a village 30 kilometres from Bargal, Mohamed Gure.
Duale Hussein Mohamed, a local elder, said the US warship “hit nomadic residential areas. We think there are more casualties.”
The US military has at times stepped in to support Somalia’s struggling authorities.
In January, another US naval operation targeted Al-Qaeda operatives blamed both for the 1998 US embassy bombings and the 2002 suicide attack on an Israeli-owned hotel in the Kenyan Indian Ocean city of Mombasa that killed 15 people.
Local elders said more than 100 civilians were killed in the operation. — AFP
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