Gunmen storm beachside hotel in Somali capital, killing more than 10 people
Mogadishu: Militants detonated a car bomb in front of an hotel in the Somali capital, then stormed the beachside property. State security forces engaged in a four-hour standoff before killing two attackers who had been holding those inside hostage.
A spokesman for the country's Information Ministry said the attackers, who belonged to the militant group al-Shabab, killed 10 people. However, Al Jazeera was reporting up to 17 deaths from the Sunday afternoon attack. The ministry said 205 others were rescued from the Elite Hotel on Lido Beach.
Medical workers and other Somalis help a woman, who was wounded when a powerful car bomb blew off the security gates to the Elite Hotel, as she arrives at a hospital in Mogadishu.Credit:AP
Abdulkadir Adan, the director of Aamin Ambulance, a private company that is often the first at the scenes of attacks, said 32 injured people had been transported to hospitals, some in critical condition.
"We lost one of our colleagues, named Abdirizak Abdi," said Ismael Omar, the ministry spokesman. "The blast was huge and followed by gunshots." He said later that a defence ministry employee Dahir Ali Gawl also was killed.
Omar said there were at least four assailants, adding that two were killed at the hotel's gate and that two had made it inside, armed with automatic rifles.
Abdullahi Mohamed Nor, the hotel's owner and a member of parliament, wrote on his personal Facebook account: "May Allah have mercy upon those who perished in the attack which terrorists carried out at the Elite Hotel. I was at the hotel when the attack happened, may Allah give a quick recovery for the wounded people. I am safe and sound."
Sieges of hotels are a hallmark tactic of al-Shabab, which claimed Sunday's attack. The al-Qaeda-affiliated armed group controls vast parts of rural Somalia and regularly stages attacks in Somali cities.
In March 2019, al-Shabab fighters held another Mogadishu hotel for 20 hours, killing 25 people and wounding dozens. Three months earlier, the group laid siege to a hotel in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, and killed 21.
Al-Shabab extracts hefty "taxes" from hotel owners as part of a far-reaching protection racket it runs across the country as a means of raising funds and undermining government control. The group's largest recent attack was in December, when it detonated a truck bomb at a busy intersection, killing 82.
The US has ramped up an aggressive campaign of drone strikes against al-Shabab in part thanks to a relaxation of rules of engagement by the Trump administration in 2017.
The number of strikes has increased each year, eclipsing earlier efforts under presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, but al-Shabab has maintained its ability to regularly unleash large and deadly attacks.
The Washington Post
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