Somalia car bombing death toll rises to 79

A massive car bomb exploded in a busy area of Mogadishu on Saturday, leaving at least 79 people dead and scores injured in Somalia’s deadliest attack in two years.

At least 16 of those killed were students from the capital’s private Banadir University, who had been travelling on a bus when the car bomb detonated at a busy intersection southwest of the Somali capital.

Scores of wounded were carried on stretchers from the site, where the force of the explosion left the charred and twisted remains of vehicles. Two Turkish nationals were also killed, Turkey’s Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Twitter.

The area was often clogged with traffic due to a security checkpoint and a tax office collecting fees from buses and trucks passing through.

Banadir University said they would shut for five days after the disaster.

“This was a black day, it was a day when parents who have sent their children to learn were sent back the dead bodies of their children,” University chairman Mohamed Mohamud Hassan said in an audio message released on Saturday evening.

President Mohamed Abdullahi Farmaajo condemned the attack in comments carried by the Somalia national news agency SONNA.

Prime Minister Hassan Ali Khiere appointed an emergency committee to work on providing help to those who have been wounded in the blast.

Witness Muhibo Ahmed said the attack was a “devastating incident because there were many people including students in buses who were passing by the area when the blast occurred.”

Mogadishu is regularly hit by attacks by al-Shabaab, which has fought for more than a decade to topple the Somali government.

The militant group emerged from the Islamic Courts Union that once controlled central and southern Somalia and is variously estimated to number between 5,000 and 9,000 men.

In 2010, the Shabaab declared their allegiance to Al-Qaeda.

But they retain control of large rural swathes of the country and continue to wage a guerrilla war against the authorities, managing to inflict bloody death tolls in attacks at home and abroad.

Since 2015, there have been 13 attacks in Somalia with death tolls above 20. Eleven of these have been in Mogadishu, according to a tally of AFP figures.

All of them involved car bombs.

The deadliest attack in the country’s history was a truck bombing in Oct 2017 in Mogadishu which left 512 people dead and around 295 injured.

Agencies

 

Dhaka/Nasim