A bomb blast in Somalia’s capital exposes the government’s failures

IN HIS ten years driving an ambulance in Mogadishu, Ahmed Said Hassan had never seen anything like it. Arriving at the scene of Saturday’s explosion, what he remembered as a bustling intersection crowded with street hawkers, vegetable sellers, and hotel guests had been transformed into a post-apocalyptic scene: the carbonised bodies of those killed in the explosion were strewn across the street, the Safari Hotel was rubble, and heat from the fire raging in the explosion’s aftermath could be felt 100 metres from the scene.

“There aren’t words to describe that kind of devastation,” Hassan says. “Everyone looked like they were dead or dying, everyone had massive injuries and we didn’t have enough space to transport them all.”

The attack was the deadliest in the already turbulent history of Somalia’s capital. It was particularly devastating because a truck loaded with a mixture of homemade and military explosives detonated next to a fuel tanker on a...Continue reading

Source: Middle East and Africa http://ift.tt/2yvmjWV

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