A Swedish journalist has been shot and killed in the Somali capital while attending a mass demonstration organized by Islamic courts that seized Mogadishu this month, witnesses said.
An unknown gunman shot the journalist in the chest at close range at a rally site in the southern part of the city where some 4,000 Islamists were demonstrating in support of the courts, they said.
His employer could not immediately be established but various sources said he had told them he was working for Britain’s Channel Four television and a Swedish newspaper.
“He was shot and killed while attending the rally,” said Mohamed Amin, a Somali journalist who was at the scene.
“He died on the spot,” Amin told AFP.
A second witness said a gunman had shot the journalist in the chest, near his heart in deliberate fashion and that the surrounding crowd had scattered in panic.
“It was not an accident,” the witness told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity citing security fears. “It was an intentional murder by someone who wanted to kill a journalist.”
A speaker at the rally condemned the killing and pledged that the gunman or gunmen would be punished.
“He is not one of us,” the speaker, a cleric, told the crowd. “We are against the killing of a journalist who is a guest.
“This person deserves to be punished for killing somebody for no reason,” the speaker said. “With the help of Allah we will find him and punish him accordingly.”
The journalist, whose body was taken Bamadir Hospital, was believed to have arrived in Mogadishu about a week ago, according to witnesses and staff at the Shamo Hotel where he was staying.
Hotel employees said the man had carried a Swedish passport and was accompanied by two colleagues, a man and a woman, both of whom were extremely distraught by the killing.
Some witnesses said the shooting may have been linked the publication by a Danish newspaper last year of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed that enraged many in the Muslim world, including Somalia.
Mogadishu has been under the control of militia loyal to the city’s Islamic courts since June 5 when they seized most of the capital, ousting a US-backed warlord alliance.
The situation there has been tense with anti-US sentiment running high. Demonstrators at Friday’s rally burned the flags of the United States and Ethiopia, which the courts have accused of sending troops to back the warlords.
The killing is the first of a foreign journalist in the city since the shooting death last year of BBC producer Kate Peyton, who was slain outside a hotel in Mogadishu on February 9, 2005.
Source: AFP, June 23, 2006
