Tuesday, September 19, 2006
BAIDOA, Somalia (Reuters) – Somali police stepped up investigations on Tuesday to discover who was behind the country’s first known suicide bombing, which targeted interim President Abdullahi Yusuf.
Yusuf has blamed al Qaeda for the attack, which killed five people including his brother outside parliament in the provincial town of Baidoa. Six attackers were also killed in a gun battle with Yusuf’s bodyguards after the explosion.
Officials said despite 15 years of clan-based fighting, the Monday attack raised fears that Somalia was facing a new kind of violence with the unprecedented suicide bombing.
Witnesses said the government had tightened security in Baidoa, with government militia controlling major entry roads and increasing patrols on the streets and around the airport.
“The security is very tight,” Foreign Minister Ismail Hurre Buba, told Reuters in Nairobi. “We are in the process of investigations and we are getting a lot of information.”
Yusuf told the BBC Somali service that the attackers rammed a car packed with explosives into his convoy but he escaped the burning car.
Ibrahim Shino, the deputy governor of Somalia’s Bay region, where Baidoa is located said that while investigations were ongoing, the attack pointed to people linked to the Islamists who are in control of the capital Mogadishu.
“This evil act was organized by people linked to the Islamic Courts in Mogadishu. We have never seen such a coordinated attack in Baidoa,” he told a press conference.
The government has avoided directly blaming the powerful Islamists who in June seized Mogadishu from U.S.-backed warlords who had run it for the past 15 years.
Both sides have held two rounds of peace talks in the Sudanese capital Khartoum, pledging to work together and form a joint military force.
The Islamists blamed outside interference for the bomb attack and singled out Ethiopia, which witnesses and regional experts say has deployed troops to Somalia to protect the internationally recognized government now in its second year.
There was no immediate comment from Ethiopia, which has repeatedly denied interference in Somalia.
Somalia descended into lawlessness in 1991 when warlords toppled military dictator Mohamed Siad Barre and the country’s 14th attempt at central administration since the ouster has been stymied by infighting and the newly empowered Islamists.
Source: Reuters, Sept 19, 2006
