(Reuters) - The number of people killed in twin
suicide bomb attacks on two restaurants in Somalia’s southern city of Baidoa
has risen to 20 and another 40 people were injured, a local hospital official
said on Sunday.
Two suicide bombers blew themselves
up in restaurants in Baidoa in the early evening on Saturday. Islamist militant
group al Shabaab claimed responsibility for the attack. A spokesman for the
group said it had targeted the restaurants because they were frequented by
government troops.
The attacks followed a U.S. air
strike on Friday against al Shabaab militants in Haradere, a district in
Galmudug region. Al Shabaab wants to topple Somalia’s Western-backed central
government and impose its own rule based on a strict interpretation of Islamic
sharia law.
“We received 20 dead people and about 40 others
injured from the twin blasts of yesterday,” Abdifatah Hashi, the general
manager of Baidoa city hospital told reporters on Sunday.
On Sunday, a year to the day on
which suspected al Shabaab bombings killed more than 500 people in Mogadishu, a
Somali military court carried out the execution of a man convicted of being
involved in the attacks.
“The Somali military court executed today Hasan
Aden Isak who was an al Shabaab member and accused of being behind the October
bombing,” the court’s deputy prosecutor Mumin Hussein Abdullahi told state-run
Radio Mogadishu.
Al Shabaab never claimed
responsibility for the attacks which were the deadliest since the group began
its insurgency in 2007.
Somalia has been engulfed by
violence and lawlessness since the early 1990s after the toppling of dictator
Mohamed Siad Barre.