A wounded person is carried at the scene of a car bomb outside the Education Ministry in Mogadishu. Police and witnesses said the car bomb caused a huge explosion to force their way into the fortified building, before gunmen entered with heavy gunfire. (AFP/Getty Images)
by Brian Murphy
Tuesday, April 14, 2015
Gunmen from Somalia’s militant group al-Shabab stormed a government building in the country’s capital Tuesday, exchanging fire with security forces in clashes that killed at least 10 people and left seven attackers dead, authorities said.
The daylight assault was carried out less than two weeks after the Islamist faction claimed 148 lives in a raid on a university in Kenya, officials said.
A Somali government spokesman, Ridwan Haji Abdiweli, said the death toll on Tuesday included eight civilians and two soldiers.
The compound was later secured by police and troops, officials said.
A spokesman for al-Shabab, Abdiasis Abu Musab, told the Reuters news agency that the group staged the attack, which began with blasts outside a building in Mogadishu that houses the education and oil ministries.
Capt. Mohamed Hussein, a senior police officer, said one of the explosions was a suicide car bomb at the gate of the walled complex that opened the way for the gunmen, the Associated Press reported.
Al-Shabab, which has links to al-Qaeda, has waged attacks for years in Somalia as part of a campaign to impose strict Islamic rule. The group frequently claims that government education officials favor Western-oriented curriculum.
The group also has increasingly unleashed its fighters across the border in Kenya in retaliation for anti-terrorism deployments in Somalia by Kenyan-led troops from the African Union.
On April 6, al Shabaab gunmen killed 148 people at Kenya’s Garrissa University College, about 120 miles from the Somali border.
In late March, al-Shabab militants attacked a hotel in Mogadishu, killing 14.
Education offices have been targeted before. In 2011, a suicide car bomber killed at least 70 people, including many students applying for Turkish scholarships.