Alwaght- At least 100 people were killed after two car bombings hit a busy junction in Somalia's capital, President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud said on Sunday.
The blasts occurred on Saturday, at the Sobe junction in Mogadishu, near the education ministry. The site was the same junction that saw an al-Shabab* truck bombing in 2017 that killed over 500 people.
President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, at the site of the explosions in Mogadishu, told journalists that nearly 300 other people were wounded. “We ask our international partners and Muslims around the world to send their medical doctors here since we can’t send all the victims outside the country for treatment,” he said.
The al-Qaeda-linked al-Shabab extremist group, which often targets the capital and controls large parts of the country, claimed responsibility, saying it targeted the education ministry. It claimed the ministry was an “enemy base” that receives support from non-Muslim countries and “is committed to removing Somali children from the Islamic faith.”
Al-Shabab usually doesn’t make claims of responsibility when large numbers of civilians are killed, as in the 2017 blast, but it has been angered by a high-profile new offensive by the government that also aims to shut down its financial network.
