By Abdi Sheikh and Abdiqani Hassan
MOGADISHU (Reuters) – A car bomb and shooting attack on a hotel in the Somali city of Kismayu killed nine people on Sunday before security forces ended the siege of the establishment and killed the attackers, police said. .
The shooting began after a vehicle loaded with explosives crashed into the gate of the Tawakal Hotel, located in the port city of Kismayu. The al-Qaida-linked militant group Al Shabaab claimed responsibility for the attack.
“In the explosion, nine people, including students and civilians, were killed and another 47 were injured, some of them seriously,” Yussuf Hussein Dhumal, Jubbaland’s security minister, told Reuters.
“The hotel where the explosion happened was close to a school, so many students were injured.”
Security forces killed three of the attackers and a fourth died in the bomb blast, Dhumal said.
Before the attack, a meeting was being held at the hotel to discuss how to fight Al Shabaab, Farah Mohamed, a security official in the city of Kismayu, told Reuters.
Mohamed Nur, a police captain, and Farah Ali, a shopkeeper in Kismayu, told Reuters the hotel explosion preceded the shooting.
Video footage from Somali National Television posted on the network’s Twitter account showed security personnel loading one of the wounded into an ambulance.
Abdiasis Abu Musab, a spokesman for Al Shabaab, said the group was responsible for the attack, which he said was intended to target administrators from the Jubbaland region who work at the hotel.
Kismayu is the commercial capital of Jubbaland, a region of southern Somalia still partially controlled by Al Shabaab.
Al Shabaab was expelled from Kismayu in 2012. The city’s port was a major source of revenue for the terrorist group, thanks to taxes, coal exports, and levies on weapons and other illegal imports.
In 2019, a similar attack at another hotel in Kismayu killed at least 26 people.
The group is fighting to overthrow the central government and impose its shadow government based on its own strict interpretation of Islamic sharia law. It has killed thousands of Somalis and hundreds of civilians across East Africa in over a decade.
Somali security forces said they made gains in the battle against Al Shabaab in recent weeks as they fought alongside local self-defense groups, but the enemy continues to carry out deadly attacks.
(Reporting Abdi Sheikh and Feisal Omar in Mogadishu and Abdiqani Hassan in Bosaso)
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