Two Car bombs explode at Somalia’s education ministry

By : Zakeriye ahmed Horndiplomat Correspondent

On Saturday, within a few minutes, two simultaneous car bomb blasts at Somalia’sSomalia’s Ministry of Education, located between busy junctions in Somalia’s capital of Mogadishu of Zobe and Banadir.

The number of casualties is still unknown, but according to Mogadishu’s local media, a local TV anchor Mohamed Isse Koona and Mogadishu’ Hodan District Police commissioner Hussein Aded Osman died in the explosions.

Abdifatah Aynab, the counsellor of Somalia’s embassy in China, Reuters photojournalist Feisal Omar, VOA Somali service journalist Abdukadir Mohamed and others were wounded.

An official statement from Somalia’s police spokesperson Sadik Dodishe said, “An unknown number of people, including women and children, were killed in Saturday’s cowardly terrorist attacks in Mogadishu. Security officials are gathering the details and will share them with the public in due course”.

Founder and chairman of the Aamin Ambulance service in Mogadishu, Abdikadir Abdirahman, told Reuters news agency that a driver and a first aid worker were injured in the second blast as their ambulance came to transport casualties from the first bombing.

No one claimed responsibility for the attack, but Al-Qaeda’s linked terrorist group of Al-Shabab regularly takes out such attacks in the East African nation of Somalia.

On October 14, 2017, Al-Shabab militants claimed responsibility for Somalia’s deadliest attack in today’s same spot where more than 500 hundred people died and thousands were injured.

Last week Somalia’s Jubaland state security forces ended Kismayo’s Hotel Tawakal siege after six hours when Al-Shabab militants stormed the hotel, leaving nine people, including students, dead and another wounding 47 in the attack.

Today’s attack comes after top officials and member states’ leaders in Somalia’s government attended the closing ceremony of the national consultative conference on combating and eliminating extremist ideology in the ministry of religious affairs, which started on October 24.