Mogadishu, Somalia – Five people were killed in a powerful car bomb blast late Sunday at a cafe in the Somali capital Mogadishu that was packed with football fans watching the Euro 2024 final, local media said, citing police.
Images posted online showed a huge fireball and plumes of smoke billowing into the night sky as the explosion ripped through the popular restaurant in the centre of the city.
“A car bomb detonated tonight outside Top Coffee Restaurant… placed by Kharijite terrorists,” the Somali National News Agency reported, using the term officials adopt to describe the Al-Qaeda linked Al-Shabaab jihadist group.
“Preliminary police reports confirm five fatalities and around 20 injuries,” SONNA cited police spokesman Major Abdifitah Aden Hassan as telling state media.
Somali National Television reported the same information about the bombing, which took place as young men were watching the match between Spain and England.
An AFP journalist said firefighters, police and ambulances had rushed to the scene of the explosion.
Police have cordoned off the area, which is close to the presidential palace compound known as Villa Somalia and was very busy at the time of the bombing.
Al-Shabaab has been waging a bloody insurgency against Somalia’s fragile federal government for more than 17 years and has carried out numerous bombings in Mogadishu and other parts of the country.
– Government offensive –
There had been a relative lull in attacks in recent months as the government presses on with an offensive against the Islamist militants.
But on Saturday, five inmates said to be Al-Shabaab fighters were killed in a shootout with prison guards in an attempted jail break from the main prison in Mogadishu.
Three guards were also killed and 18 others wounded in the confrontation, prison officials said, after the prisoners managed to get hold of weapons.
Somalia’s President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud has vowed “all-out” war against the jihadists and government troops have joined forces with local clan militias in a military campaign supported by an African Union force and US air strikes.
But the offensive has suffered setbacks, with Al-Shabaab earlier this year claiming it had taken multiple locations in the centre of the country.
Although driven out of the capital by AU forces in 2011, Al-Shabaab still has a strong presence in rural Somalia.
It has carried out repeated attacks against political, security and civilian targets, mostly in Somalia but also in neighbouring countries including Kenya.
Somalia last month called for the African Union to slow the planned withdrawal of its forces from the troubled country.
UN resolutions called for troop numbers in the AU peacekeeping mission, known as ATMIS, to be reduced to zero by December 31 with security handed over to the Somali army and police.
The third and penultimate phase was to see the departure of 4,000 soldiers out of a total 13,500 ATMIS troops by the end of June.
But, following a request from Somalia’s government to see only 2,000 troops leave in June and the remaining 2,000 in September, the AU Peace and Security Council said it “strongly supports… a phased approach” to the drawdown.
