By Guled Mohamed
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
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MOGADISHU, May 16 (Reuters) - A remote-controlled bomb killed four African Union peacekeepers from Uganda and a civilian on Wednesday in the Somali capital, in the kind of Iraq-style attack threatened by militant Islamist insurgents.
Five peacekeepers and two children were also wounded in the attack on an AU convoy, which an AU security source said was the first of its kind against the 1,600-strong Ugandan contingent -- who had previously only been shot at.
"We lost four and five were wounded. It was a roadside bomb and its intention was to hit peacekeepers," AU mission spokesman Captain Paddy Ankunda said of the bomb near the city's old port.
The injured soldiers will be evacuated to Uganda's capital Kampala. "Some of them are seriously wounded," Ankunda said.
Suspicion immediately fell on Islamist insurgents who have waged a guerrilla campaign in the capital since the interim government and its Ethiopian allies seized control of the city from them in late December.
The government, along with the United States and Ethiopia, accuses the Islamists of having links to al Qaeda, and Osama bin Laden has urged his followers to help Somali insurgents. The rebels have promised an Iraq-style insurgency.
The explosion shattered a relative calm in Mogadishu that had endured since battles between insurgents and the interim government, backed by its Ethiopian allies, which killed at least 1,300 people in March and April.
HIDDEN IN GARBAGE
A witness who escaped injury said the bomb had been hidden in a pile of garbage.
"I was walking when suddenly I heard a loud bang and found myself in the air. I fell a few metres away. I thought I was dead. I touched my whole body to see if I had any wounds," Muhyidin Ahmed, a 32-year-old father of six, told Reuters.
A man urinating in a bush nearby was blown to pieces, Ahmed said: "His flesh is scattered everywhere." Two children were wounded while playing and rushed to hospital, he added.
The attack appeared to contradict the interim government's assessment, shared by the Ethiopian government, that the insurgency had been defeated and the city pacified.
Somalia has been in anarchy since the 1991 fall of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, and this government is the 14th attempt at establishing central authority.
Use of roadside bombs -- a favourite weapon in Iraq -- is on the rise. "We have overcome many which were detected. This was a remote-controlled bomb," the AU security source said.
Security experts said the blast, along with assassinations of government officials and attacks on United Nations offices, pointed to a coalescing insurgency.
"They are not gone, they have just been scattered. The bad boys are resilient. They have changed tactics and they are going to do it a la Baghdad," said one, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Late on Tuesday near the central city of Jowhar, gunmen attacked the convoy of the Lower Shabelle region's governor, Mohamed Omar Deele, and killed four soldiers and two journalists travelling with them, a government soldier in the convoy said.
Also on Tuesday, an attacker threw a grenade into a cinema in Baardheere, southern Somalia, killing five and wounding 30. The Islamists, during their brief rule in southern Somalia last year, often closed cinemas, which they saw as un-Islamic. (Additional reporting by Bryson Hull in Nairobi, Sahra Abdi Ahmed in Kismayu and Ibrahim Mohamed in Mogadishu)
Source: Reuters, May 16, 2007