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Truck bomb in Somali capital kills at least 79 at rush hour

MOGADISHU, Somalia (AP) — A truck bomb exploded at a busy security checkpoint in Somalia’s capital Saturday morning, killing at least 79 people including many students, authorities said. It was the worst attack in Mogadishu since the devastating 2017 bombing that killed hundreds.

The
explosion ripped through rush hour as Somalia returned to work after its
weekend. At least 125 people were wounded, Aamin Ambulance service
director Abdiqadir Abdulrahman said, and hundreds of Mogadishu residents
donated blood in response to desperate appeals.

President Mohamed
Abdullahi Mohamed condemned the attack as a “heinous act of terror” and
blamed the local al-Shabab extremist group, which is linked to al-Qaida
and whose reach has extended to deadly attacks on luxury malls and schools in neighboring Kenya.

Bodies
lay on the ground amid the blackened skeletons of vehicles. At a
hospital, families and friends picked through dozens of the dead,
gingerly lifting sheets to peer at faces.

Most of those killed
were university students returning to class and police officers, said
Somalia’s police chief Gen. Abdi Hassan Hijar. He said the vehicle
detonated after police at the checkpoint blocked it from proceeding into
the city.

Somalis mourned the deaths of so many young people in a
country trying to rebuild itself after decades of conflict. Two Turkish
brothers were among the dead, Somalia’s foreign minister said, and
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan condemned the attack.

There
was no immediate claim of responsibility, but al-Shabab often carries
out such attacks. The extremist group was pushed out of Mogadishu
several years ago but continues to target high-profile areas such as
checkpoints and hotels in the seaside city.

Al-Shabab is now able to make
its own explosives, its “weapon of choice,” United Nations experts
monitoring sanctions on Somalia said earlier this year. The group had
previously relied on military-grade explosives captured during assaults
on an African Union peacekeeping force.

Despite that advance in
bomb-making, one security expert said the unlikely choice of target
Saturday — a checkpoint at the western entrance to the capital —
reflected al-Shabab’s weakening capability to plan and execute attacks
at will. Mogadishu recently introduced tougher security measures that
Somali officials said make it more difficult to smuggle in explosives.

“It
feels like they literally knew that their (car bomb) may not proceed
through the checkpoint into the city undetected, considering the
additional obstacles ahead, so bombing the busy checkpoint in a show of
strength appeared to be an ideal decision,” the Mogadishu-based Ahmed
Barre told The Associated Press.

Al-Shabab was blamed for the
truck bombing in Mogadishu in October 2017 that killed more than 500
people, but the group never claimed responsibility for the blast that
led to widespread public outrage. Some analysts said al-Shabab didn’t
dare claim credit as its strategy of trying to sway public opinion by
exposing government weakness had badly backfired.

“This explosion
is similar like the one … in 2017. This one occurred just a few steps
away from where I am and it knocked me on the ground from its force. I
have never seen such a explosion in my entire life,” witness Abdurrahman
Yusuf said.

The attack again raises concern about the readiness
of Somali forces to take over responsibility for the Horn of Africa
country’s security in the coming months from the AU force.

Al-Shabab,
the target of a growing number of U.S. airstrikes since President
Donald Trump took office, controls parts of Somalia’s southern and
central regions. It funds itself with a “taxation” system that experts
describe as extortion of businesses and travelers that brings in
millions of dollars a year.

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Video journalist Mohamed Sheikh Nor in Mogadishu contributed.