Somalia: Suicide Bombers kill 15

Somalia Suicide Bomb

 Highlighting the security challenges facing the country's new president, Police Report says Two suicide bombers walked into a restaurant in central Mogadishu and killed at least 15 people on Thursday.

Police spokesman General Abdullahi Barise told Reuters 15 people were killed in Thursday's attack. A Reuters photographer saw several bodies, the severed heads of the two bombers and pools of blood on the floor.

The blasts targeted The Village restaurant, owned by well-known Somali businessman Ahmed Jama, who had returned to his home country from London to set up business against the advice of friends.

"My relatives, whom I created jobs for, have perished. My customers have perished. All innocent people. I cannot count them, their dead bodies are before me," a distraught Jama told Reuters.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility. However, suspicions will fall on the Islamist militant group al Shabaab which has carried out a campaign of suicide bombings since it withdrew from the capital last year under military pressure.

Three local journalists were among the dead, including a reporter at the state-run Somali National Television, the National Union of Somali Journalists said.

The al Shabaab-linked website www.somalimemo.net said in a statement that those killed "supported the infidel government" but stopped short of saying the group was behind the attack.

Meanwhile, the al Qaeda-linked group claimed responsibility for suicide bombings last week outside a hotel where President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud was holding a news conference just two days into the job, an attack interpreted as a warning from the insurgents that they are far from defeated.

Source: Reuters