A senior official of Somali insurgent group al-Shabaab was shot dead on Friday in a rare assassination in the southern port of Kismayu, which is tightly controlled by the al Qaeda-linked rebels.
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Sheik Daud Ali Hasan, who was in charge of the Shabaab’s military operations in the town of Dhobley on the Kenyan border, was killed by men armed with handguns as he headed home in Kismayo on Friday night. "We have arrested some suspects but we are still investigating the incident and by God’s will we will arrest those behind the killing," Sheikh Abukar Ali Adan, a senior Shabaab administrative official in the region, said. "I heard gunshots and saw two men running; we rushed to the scene and there was a body lying there in a pool of blood," witness Abdi Hasan Ise told AFP by telephone. While Shabaab and rebel group Hizbul Islam have fought together in the capital against the Western-backed government, the two insurgent movements have been at loggerheads for months in the south of the Horn of Africa nation. They have battled for control of Kismayu, the lucrative main port for rebel-held areas of southern Somalia, as well as the town of Dhobley on the main road linking the port to neighboring Kenya. Hizbul Islam denied having a hand in the killing, but said it would step up attacks on Dhobley after a raid on Friday night in which it said it killed a number of al Shabaab militants. Somalia has had no effective government for 19 years and Western nations and neighbors say the anarchic country is used as a shelter by militants intent on launching attacks in east Africa and further afield. At least 21,000 Somalis have been killed since the start of 2007, 1.5 million have been uprooted from their homes and nearly half a million are sheltering in other countries in the region. |