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Saturday, March 29, 2008
MOGADISHU (AFP) — Eight people were killed and several others wounded Saturday in Somalia during clashes between Islamist insurgents and government forces in Mogadishu, witnesses told AFP.
An AFP correspondent saw the bodies of three people who were killed when an artillery shell struck the heart of the Bakara market area.
Witnesses reported five other deaths in the same incident.
"Four men were selling textile products when they were hit by the shell," eyewitness Ahmed Abdi said, adding all four died on the spot.
"A young girl who was hit by shrapnel also died," said Abdinasir Olad, a Bakara trader. Other witnesses confirmed the deaths and several people had also been wounded.
The casualties occurred when Somali government and Ethiopian troops responded to mortar shells fired by Islamist insurgents on the presidential compound, where Ethiopian Foreign Minister Seyoum Mesfin held talks with Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed.
"Several mortars landed in the palace area and there were not any casualties," Bahuko Baridye, spokesman for the African Union peacekeeping mission in Somalia, told AFP.
The spokesman could not confirm that Seyoum was inside the compound at the time of the attack. "It's certain however that the Ethiopian foreign minister was in Mogadishu when the shells landed."
The official website of the Islamist movement's military wing said seven mortar shells had been fired at the palace, targeting the president and the Ethiopian official.
Seyoum's visit to Mogadishu was not scheduled but a Somali government official speaking on condition of anonymity confirmed that the Ethiopian foreign minister held talks with Yusuf.
The government has initiated measures with clan leaders in Mogadishu to allow the flashpoint Bakara neighbourhood to police itself so long as insurgents were also kept at bay.
Thousands of people, many of them civilians, have died over the past year in violence between Ethiopian-backed government troops and insurgents.
Ethiopia's military came to the rescue of the embattled Somali transitional government in late 2006 to oust an Islamist militia that briefly controlled large parts of the country and imposed strict Sharia law.
Source: AFP, Mar 29, 2008