Suicide bombers kill 15 in Somali capital

Two suicide bombers walked into a restaurant in central Mogadishu and killed at least 15 people on Thursday, police said, highlighting the security challenges facing the country’s new president. Al-Qaeda linked Shebab insurgents said Thursday that supporters of the extremist group had carried out the bombing. "Action has been taken by sympathisers of the Shebab, who were angry with the situation in Somalia," militant spokesman Ali Mohamud Rage told AFP. But the group had not directly ordered the attacks, he added. The Al-Qaeda-linked group claimed responsibility for suicide bombings last week outside a hotel where President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud was holding a news conference just two days into the job, an an attack interpreted as a warning from the insurgents that they are far from defeated. Police spokesman General Abdullahi Barise told Reuters 15 people were killed in Thursday’s attack. A Reuters photographer saw several bodies, the severed heads of the two bombers and pools of blood on the floor. The blasts targeted The Village restaurant, owned by well-known Somali businessman Ahmed Jama, who had returned to his home country from London to set up business against the advice of friends. “My relatives, whom I created jobs for, have perished. My customers have perished. All innocent people. I cannot count them, their dead bodies are before me,” a distraught Jama told Reuters. Three local journalists were among the dead, including the director of the state-run Somali National Television, the National Union of Somali Journalists said.