AL SHABAB CLAIMS RESPONSIBILITY FOR MOGADISHU BOMBINGS

    Mogadishu, 3 Zul-qaadah 1434/8 September 2013 (MINA) – Somali fighters Islamist organization, Al Shabab, has claimed the responsibility for the blasts that rocked Somali capital Mogadishu Saturday, killing at least 20 people.

     A web statement by the group said they attacked the restaurant called Feyic, a place mainly preferred by government officials, Anadolu Agency quoted by Mi’raj News Agency (MINA) as reporting.

    “Successful operations carried out in Mogadishu’s Hamarweyne district,” the group said on its Somali-language Twitter feed.

    The al-Qaeda-linked group claimed to have killed “key officials”, but witnesses said the casualties they had seen looked like ordinary civilians, Aljazeera reports.

    It said the attacks targeted Feylic restaurant owned by people who were in conncection with Western intelligence services and Al Shabab had warned people not to go to that restaurant many times previously.

     Police and witnesses said the source of the first blast was a car laden with explosives that was parked by a restaurant close to the National Theatre.

     “There were two heavy explosions at a parking lot near the National Theatre,” police officer Mohamed Adan told the AFP news agency.

     The second blast, which followed minutes later, was a “suicide bomber who blew himself up in the crowd of civilians who rushed to the scene of the first blast,” Ahmed Weli Said, a Somali government security official, said.

     Meanwhile Somalia’s president Hassan Sheikh Mahmud in a written statement offerred condolences to family and friends of those who were killed in the blasts and Somalia’s Foreign Ministry said the attacks were “cowardly and brutal”.

      At least 20 people have been killed when two bombs targetted a restaurant in Mogadishu Saturday morning. (T/P09/E1).

Mi’raj News Agency (MINA).