African Union Soldiers Kill 25 Somalis, Witnesses Say

Bloomberg
Tuesday, February 03, 2009

African Union peacekeepers shot dead at least 25 Somali civilians after their convoy was targeted in a roadside bomb attack, two eye-witnesses said. An AU mission spokesman denied his forces killed anyone.

Abdi Fatah Ibrahim Omar Shaweye, deputy governor in charge of security in the capital, Mogadishu, said Ugandan members of the AU Mission in Somalia, known as Amisom, fired indiscriminately at civilians on Maka al-Mukarama Road south of the city yesterday. A Somali cameraman who recorded the event had his camera confiscated, he said.

“I saw 25 dead civilian bodies on the spot, lying on the ground, but I’ve received reports there were about 39 dead bodies,” Shaweye said. “All the civilians died at the hands of the Ugandan troops and their bullets.”

Somalia is in its 18th year of a civil war that has forced more than 3 million people into exile and displaced at least 800,000. The Horn of Africa nation’s Western-backed government is fighting the Islamist al-Shabaab militia for control over the nation of 10 million people, and the number in need of aid increased by 77 percent to 3.2 million last year.

Somalia’s new president, Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, told reporters today at the AU summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia that he stressed during meetings with AU’s peace and security commission that AMISOM’s “reactions should be proportionate.”

Amisom Denial

Amisom has 2,850 peacekeepers in Somalia, 1,600 from Uganda and 1,250 from Burundi, according to its Web site. Both the AU and the United Nations Security Council have appealed to African nations to contribute to the mission and increase the number of peacekeepers to 8,000. Nigeria, Ghana and Malawi have failed to fulfill their pledge to contribute to the deployment.

Amisom spokesman Major Barigye Bahuko denied the shootings.

“Our convoy was targeted by explosive material and two of our soldiers sustained minor injuries,” Bahuko said by phone from Mogadishu yesterday. “Our soldiers didn’t kill any civilians.”

Ibraahim Mohamed Hussein Jeekey, director of Universal TV, a London-based satellite-television broadcaster, confirmed one of his cameramen, Niganiyd Nyjtar Abdulle, had his equipment taken by Ugandan soldiers while filming yesterday.

A camera was confiscated while Abdulle “was recording an event where dozens of civilian were massacred,” Jeekey said in an interview. “They told us that they will give the camera back tomorrow and will erase the recordings.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Hamsa Omar in Dar es Salaam via Johannesburg at [email protected].

Last Updated: February 3, 2009 10:37 EST