Terrorists Attack Popular Mogadishu Hotel

Five of Somalia’s Islamic terrorists attacked a leading hotel in the capital at dawn Sunday, killing at least six people and injuring 10, before all the assailants were killed by security forces.

The Somali army and the African Union forces ended the siege by the al-Shabab attackers at the Sahafi Hotel by midday, police commander Ali Ahmed said.

The attack started at daybreak when a suicide bomber detonated an explosives-laden vehicle at the hotel’s entrance gate and then four men, armed with AK-47 rifles, propelled grenades and suicide vests, invaded the premises. Some of them went into rooms to kill residents while others went to the hotel’s rooftop to fight off government soldiers who came to battle them, said Capt. Mohamed Hussein, a senior Somali police officer.

A second explosion came from a car bomb outside the hotel, said witnesses.

Among those killed was the hotel’s owner and a former military general, Hussein said.

Al-Shabab, thQe Islamic terrorist rebels waging an insurgency against Somalia’s weak U.N.- backed government, claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement by Sheikh Abdiaziz Abu-Musab, the terrorists’ military spokesman, delivered on the group’s radio station, Andulus.

This article appeared in print on page 2 of the November 2nd, 2015 edition of Hamodia.