At least six people were killed and 12 injured on Thursday (February 10th) in a suspected suicide bombing near a checkpoint leading to the presidential palace in the Somali capital Mogadishu, security and hospital sources said.
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“The area was densely populated when the blast happened and some victims, mostly civilians, are seriously injured“, told AFP a senior security force official, Abdullahi Muktar, indicating that the explosion had “killed six people and injured 12 others“. An investigation is underway to find out the exact circumstances, “but preliminary observations indicate“that a probable suicide bomber”triggered the explosion“, he added. A statement from the Aamin ambulance service mentioned the same number of deaths, but reported 13 injuries. “The explosion was huge, I saw ambulances transporting wounded, some of them seriously injuredsaid a witness, Mohamed Tahlil.
A political stalemate
The Somali capital Mogadishu has been the scene of several attacks in recent weeks. The country has been plunged into a deep political crisis since President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, known as Farmajo, saw his mandate expire on February 8, 2021 without having succeeded in organizing elections. Since then, the president and his prime minister Mohamed Hussein Roble have regularly displayed their differences, which have fueled the delays in the electoral process.
Under Somalia’s complex electoral system, assemblies from the country’s five states and delegates from myriad clans and sub-clans choose lawmakers who, in turn, appoint the president. Voting for the upper house was completed last year and clan delegates have so far elected around 40% of the 275 MPs in the lower house. This political stalemate worries international donors who fear it will divert attention from the threat of Al-Shabaab Islamist insurgents who have been fighting the government for more than a decade.
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On Tuesday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced that he was restricting access to “visas for current or former Somali officials or others suspected of being responsible or complicit in undermining the democratic process in Somalia“. “This policy will apply to individuals who have played a role in procedural irregularities that have undermined the electoral process, who have failed to meet their obligations to implement timely and transparent elections, and who have harassed, intimidated, arrested journalists and members of opposition parties, or engaged in violence against them“, he explained in a press release. Ousted from Mogadishu by the force of the African Union (Amisom) in 2011, the Shebab still control vast rural areas and regularly carry out attacks in Mogadishu.