3 Shebab militants killed in Somali intelligence base attack
Shebab militants launched a major suicide attack on Sunday
against a military intelligence base in Somalia's capital Mogadishu, setting
off a car bomb before storming inside, security officials said.
According to AFP, the interior ministry said the three attackers, one of them
a suicide bomber, were all killed in the raid, and that the Somali security
forces who fought them suffered no casualties.
A spokesman for the Al-Qaeda-affiliated militants confirmed
they carried out the attack, Somali media reports said.
"The attack was successfully thwarted by our forces.
None of our buildings nor bases were entered," the internationally-backed
government's National Intelligence and Security Agency, NISA, said in a
statement.
Somali officials displayed three corpses after the attack,
which came at the start of Islam's holy fasting month of Ramadan -- a period
when the Shebab, who are fighting to topple the Mogadishu government, have in
the past intensified attacks.
"The security forces have foiled an attempted attack by
the desperate terrorists," interior ministry spokesman Mohamed Yusuf told
reporters.
"One of them detonated himself and two others were shot
dead. They were trying to storm the premises but they have been taken out
before they reached their objective. There was no casualty on our side,"
he added.
The Shebab also conducted fresh attacks in neighbouring
Kenya, with the militants gunning down a government administrator in the
restive northeastern county of Wajir late on Saturday, and ambushing a military
convoy near Lamu on Sunday, according to police.
Mohamed Barre Abdullahi, a local chief in Wajir, which is
close to the Somali border, was shot dead after evening prayers at a mosque on
Saturday.
"This is Al-Shebab's new approach, to instill fear in
people by killing leaders," Wajir's deputy county commissioner, Peter
Keleo, said at Abdullahi's funeral.
Police said Abdullahi, a village-level government
representative, was gunned down after finishing evening prayers, and that the
attackers managed to escape under cover of darkness.
Kenyan security sources said the attack was likely carried
out by the Shebab, who have stepped up operations in Kenya's northeastern
border region, including drawing up an alleged "hit list" of local
government officials who have spoken out against the group.
In the coastal county of Lamu, the scene of a string of
massacres carried out by the Shebab a year ago, a Kenyan army convoy was also
hit by a roadside bomb, police sources said. Three soldiers were reported to
have been wounded in the attack.
The Shebab, meaning "youth" in Arabic, emerged out
of a bitter insurgency against Ethiopia, whose troops entered Somalia in a 2006
United States-backed invasion to topple the Islamic Courts Union that was then controlling
the capital Mogadishu.
Shebab rebels continue to stage frequent attacks, seeking to
counter claims that they are close to defeat after losing territory in the face
of an African Union and Somali government offensive, regular US drone strikes
against their leaders and defections.
The militants have also carried out a string of revenge
attacks in neighbouring countries -- including the September 2013 attack on the
Westgate shopping mall in the Kenyan capital Nairobi, which left at least 67
people dead, and the April massacre of close to 150 students in Garissa in
Kenya's northeast.
Somalia has been wracked by instability since the collapse
of Siad Barre's hardline regime in 1991.
The current government is being supported by a 22,000-strong
African Union, AU force that includes troops from Burundi, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya and
Uganda.
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