KENYA/SOMALIA: Car bomb kills five people and wounded several others outside parliament in Baidoa in an assassination attempt on President Abdullahi Yusuf

Record ID: 361875

  • Title: KENYA/SOMALIA: Car bomb kills five people and wounded several others outside parliament in Baidoa in an assassination attempt on President Abdullahi Yusuf
  • Date: 19th September 2006
  • Summary: (EU) NAIROBI, KENYA (SEPTEMBER 18, 2006) (REUTERS) SOMALIAN FOREIGN AFFAIRS MINISTER ISMAIL HURRE BUBA WALKING TOWARDS THE CAMERAS (SOUNDBITE)(English) SOMALI MINISTER OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS, ISMAIL HURRE BUBA SAYING: "In that fight, six people of the people who were planning these assassination and who attacked the president's convoy were killed, two were also captured." W
  • Embargoed: 4th October 2006 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Topics: Crime / Law Enforcement
  • Reuters ID: LVAAYYZSPYWIM8FX8YR8P2WPQV9Z
  • Story Text: A car bomb killed five people and wounded several others outside parliament in Somalia's provincial capital Baidoa on Monday (September 18, 2006) in an assassination attempt on President Abdullahi Yusuf.
    Six attackers were killed in a gunbattle with Yusuf's bodyguards after the blast, Foreign Minister Ismail Hurre Buba told a news conference in Nairobi.
    "It was characteristically an (al) Qaeda-type attempt of a car being put near other cars and an explosion taking place through remote control. The President's convoy was moving and there was definite injuries among the people who were close to the exploded car but the President has not been hurt in this incident," Hurre said.
    Yusuf escaped unharmed and Hurre said two of the alleged assassins were captured.
    Hurre also linked Monday's violence to the murder on Sunday (September 17) of an Italian nun shot in Mogadishu.
    "We think that the attempt that happened in Baidoa is somewhat associated with what happened in Mogadishu, the cold blood assassination of the Italian nun in Mogadishu," Hurre said.
    However, Interior Minister Hussein Mohamed Farah Aideed said it was too soon to point the finger at any group.
    He added that security forces arrested two of the attackers.
    A Reuters reporter at the scene saw black smoke billowing from burning cars close to the parliament building, which he said appeared to have dead bodies in them.
    Government militiamen quickly cordoned off the area around the parliament building, a converted grain warehouse in the town 240 kms (150 miles) from the capital Mogadishu.
    The attack is sure to heighten tensions between the internationally recognised but weak government, and Islamists who control Mogadishu and a large swathe of southern Somalia.
    The two sides have held two rounds of talks in the Sudanese capital Khartoum, pledging to form a joint military force.
    In July, Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi said Osama bin Laden had training bases in Somalia and was intent on plunging the country, deprived of effective central rule since 1991, into further chaos.
    Islamist officials gave no immediate reaction to the bomb.
    The attack took place as legislators met to approve a new cabinet. Witnesses said the parliamentary session carried on as normal after the blast, with 174 lawmakers out of the 199 present approving the cabinet.
    Gedi had named new ministers in August after Yusuf declared the earlier cabinet ineffective and dissolved it on August 7.
    The explosion was the latest violence to flare up in the government's temporary seat of Baidoa.
    In July, gunmen shot dead a Somali minister outside a Baidoa mosque, in what one senior official said was an organised killing. Last year Gedi was the target of two assassination attempts in Mogadishu and Jowhar.
    Somalia descended into lawlessness in 1991 when warlords toppled military dictator Mohamed Siad Barre and the country's 14th attempt at central administration since the ouster has been stymied by infighting and the newly empowered Islamists.
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