Somalia Bombing: Death Toll Rises To 300
300 people have been reported dead after twin bomb explosions in Mogadishu. According to authorities the attack is the deadliest that the country has experienced in a decade.
Abdikadir Abdirahman, director city ambulance service, told reporters on Monday that the death toll has steadily risen since Saturday, when the blasts, for which no organisation had claimed responsibility by Monday morning, struck at two busy junctions in the heart of the city.
“We have confirmed 300 people died in the blast. The death toll will still be higher because some people are still missing.”
Aden Nur, a doctor at the city’s Madina hospital, said they had recorded 258 deaths while Ahmed Ali, a nurse at the nearby Osman Fiqi hospital, told Reuters five bodies had been sent there.
Nur said 160 of the bodies could not be recognised. “(They)were buried by the government yesterday. The others were buried by their relatives.
“Over a hundred injured were also brought here,” he said.
Officials said some of the injured were being evacuated by air to Turkey for treatment.
Locals visiting their injured relatives or collecting their bodies filled every available space in Madina hospital.
Saturday bomb attacks were the deadliest since Islamist militant group al Shabaab began an insurgency in 2007.
Neither it nor any other group had claimed responsibility, but al Shabaab, which is allied to al Qaeda, stages regular attacks in the capital and other parts of the country.
The group is waging an insurgency against Somalia’s UN-backed government and its African Union allies in a bid to impose its own strict interpretation of Islam.
The militants were driven out of Mogadishu in 2011 and have been steadily losing territory since then to the combined forces of AU peacekeepers and Somali security forces.
