Nine civilians killed in central Somalia
Mogadishu, The Gulf Observer: At least nine people were killed and several others wounded in simultaneous car bomb attacks in a town in central Somalia on Wednesday, security officials and witnesses said.
“The terrorists attacked Mahas town this morning using vehicles loaded with explosives,” local security official Abdullahi Adan told the AFP news agency by phone.
“They have targeted a civilian area and we have confirmed that nine people, all of them civilians, died in the two explosions.”
Witnesses said the blasts occurred near a restaurant not far from a district administration building.
“I saw the dead bodies of nine civilians including women and children, this was a horrible attack,” said one witness, Adan Hassan.
Somalia’s President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud has declared “all-out war” against Al Shabab, which has been waging an insurgency against the internationally-backed federal government for 15 years.
Although forced out of the country’s main urban centres around 10 years ago, Al Shabab remains entrenched in vast swathes of rural central and southern Somalia and continues to carry out deadly attacks in the face of the offensive.
