From: Yemane Natnael (yemane_natnael@yahoo.com)
Date: Sun Aug 03 2008 - 13:46:52 EDT
Blast in Somali capital kills 14
Sun Aug 3, 2008
By Abdi Sheikh
MOGADISHU (Reuters) - A roadside explosion in Mogadishu on Sunday
killed at least 14 people, most of them women who were sweeping a
street in the Somali capital, witnesses said. Nearly 50 people were
wounded.
Residents said a remotely detonated device went off along a main
road leading to the presidential palace where the street cleaners were
working.
"We have now collected the pieces of nine dead women and still there
are other parts scattered," witness Fardowsa Ahmed told Reuters.
"A minibus full of seriously injured women was rushed to hospital
and I think the death toll will be more than this. Only two women who
sell tea along the road survived," she added.
Islamist insurgents launch near-daily attacks on the transition
administration and its Ethiopian military allies. The Horn of Africa
nation has not had a functioning central government since 1991.
A rift has also opened within the interim administration between
President Abdullahi Yusuf and Prime Minister Nur Hassan Hussein.
On Sunday, Hussein appointed five ministers and a deputy minister to replace cabinet members who quit.
"The government will be working as normal and we have no worries about those who resigned," he told reporters.
Ten of Somalia's 15 ministers said they were stepping down on Saturday over financial mismanagement by Hussein's administration.
Violence has killed more than 8,000 civilians and driven one million
more from their homes in Somalia since allied Somali-Ethiopian forces
kicked an Islamist group out of Mogadishu early last year.
Four victims of the attack on Sunday died in the emergency room at
the main Madina hospital and another woman died later, bringing the
death toll to 14, hospital officials said. They expected the number of
dead to rise.
On Friday, a roadside bomb killed a Ugandan member of a small African Union peacekeeping force based in the capital.
http://uk.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUKL39260420080803
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