Baidoa, Sept 21 (AFP) – Somalia’s feeble government on Wednesday formed a committee to probe the country’s first-ever suicide bombing, an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate the interim president.
The committee, formed after President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed chaired a cabinet meeting in the temporary seat of government in Baidoa, will investigate the attacks, which triggered a gun battle that killed 11 people and wounded 18 but left the president unscathed.
“The government has set up an investigative committee of ministers and military experts to find out the real masterminds of the attack on the presidents life,” government spokesperson Abdirahman Mohamed Nur Dinari told a press conference, reading from an official statement.
Dinari renewed an appeal for foreign expertise to probe the attack, which killed five members of Yusuf’s entourage including his younger brother. Six suspected attackers were killed in the ensuing shoot-out.
The spokesperson warned that failure by the international community to support the fledgling transitional government would transform Somalia into a haven for terrorists.
“We ask the international community and the regional bodies to support us in an effort aimed at protecting our country from being an al-Qaeda safe haven,” he said.
“Lack of the international support would make it difficult for the government to deal with the threat of foreign terrorists, who are committed to destabilise the nation and destroy the fledgling hope in Somalia,” he said.
Somali Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi has blamed the attack on “terrorists” organised within the country that has been without a functioning central administration for the past 16 years.
Other officials say the attack was carried out by the same group responsible for the weekend murder of an elderly Italian nun in Mogadishu, ambushed amid fury over Pope Benedict XVI’s comments about Islam.
But in Mogadishu the Supreme Islamic Council of Somalia (SICS) denied any responsibility for Monday’s attack or the nun’s slaying, and said these were the work of the “enemies of Somalia”.
Some senior members of the Islamist movement including its supreme leader Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys – designated a “terrorist” by the United States – have been accused of al-Qaeda links and of harbouring extremists.
They deny the charges but US officials maintain that at least three men who participated in the 1998 al-Qaeda bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania are living in Somalia under the protection of the Islamists.
Fears of a Taliban-style takeover of Somalia have been rising since the Islamists seized Mogadishu in June after months of fierce battles with a US-backed alliance of warlords, and have since rapidly extended their control beyond the capital.
Osama bin Laden himself has hailed the activities of Somali Islamists, praising them for driving out US and UN peacekeepers sent to the lawless Horn of Africa nation in the mid-1990s.
In July, an audiotape attributed to Bin Laden warned the world against sending troops to shore up the transitional government’s limited authority, something the administration has repeatedly called for and to which the Islamists strongly object.
Source: AFP, Sept 21, 2006
