Sunday October 14, 2018
People gather around the wreckage of a
suicide car bomb that detonated at a security checkpoint in Somalia
[Sadak Mohamed/Anadolu Agency]
MOGADISHU (Reuters) - The
number of people killed in twin suicide bomb attacks on two restaurants
in Somalia's southern city of Baidoa has risen to 20 and another 40
people were injured, a local hospital official said on Sunday.
Two
suicide bombers blew themselves up in restaurants in Baidoa in the
early evening on Saturday. Islamist militant group al Shabaab claimed
responsibility for the attack. A spokesman for the group said it had
targeted the restaurants because they were frequented by government
troops.
The
attacks followed a U.S. air strike on Friday against al Shabaab
militants in Haradere, a district in Galmudug region. Al Shabaab wants
to topple Somalia's Western-backed central government and impose its own
rule based on a strict interpretation of Islamic sharia law.
"We
received 20 dead people and about 40 others injured from the twin
blasts of yesterday," Abdifatah Hashi, the general manager of Baidoa
city hospital told reporters on Sunday.
On
Sunday, a year to the day on which suspected al Shabaab bombings killed
more than 500 people in Mogadishu, a Somali military court carried out
the execution of a man convicted of being involved in the attacks.
"The
Somali military court executed today Hasan Aden Isak who was an al
Shabaab member and accused of being behind the October bombing," the
court's deputy prosecutor Mumin Hussein Abdullahi told state-run Radio
Mogadishu.
Al Shabaab never claimed responsibility for the attacks which were the deadliest since the group began its insurgency in 2007.
Somalia has been engulfed by violence and lawlessness since the early 1990s after the toppling of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre.
(Reporting by Feisal Omar; writing by Omar Mohammed; editing by Jason Neely and Raissa Kasolowsky)