Somalia's security minister was among 20 people killed Thursday in the country's deadliest suicide bombing claimed by the country's hardline Islamist rebels.
The blast, which ripped through a hotel in Beledweyne, near the Ethiopian border, killed minister Omar Hashi Aden and 19 others, including several government officials among his entourage, elders and witnesses said.
The high-profile assassination followed a day of fierce clashes on Wednesday between Islamist insurgents and government forces that killed at least 26 people in Mogadishu, including the capital's police commander.
Abdi Sheikh Guled, a local elder in Beledweyne, told AFP the death toll had reached 20, which he said included "top government officials and security forces who were guarding the minister." Around 30 people were wounded in the attack, officials said.
Hotel worker Ahmed Abdi said the suicide bomber drove an explosives-laden Toyota car up to the Hotel Medina as the minister and his delegation were preparing to leave.
"His body is lying at the reception," he said.
The blast left a thick pall of smoke over the town, about 300 kilometres (185 miles) north of Mogadishu, and badly damaged the hotel, where witnesses saw charred bodies among the debris.
The radical Islamic Shebab said one of its "holy warriors" had carried out the suicide attack.
"One of our Mujahedeens went with his car laden with explosives to a building where the apostate and other members from his group had been meeting," Shebab spokesman Sheikh Ali Mohamoud Rage told reporters in Mogadishu.
"The apostates have been eliminated, they all died in the suicide attack," he added.
The country's embattled President Sharif Sheikh Ahmed blamed the attack on foreign "terrorists who do not want the Somali flag to fly over this nation."
Sharif, a moderate, has repeatedly warned of a risk of Al-Qaeda setting up a "strategic zone" for its network in Somalia, through its backing for the Shebab.
Shebab has been accused of having links to Al-Qaeda.
In neighbouring Kenya, Somali Prime Minister Omar Abdirashid Sharmarke condemned "a cowardly act carried out by terrorists affiliated to Al-Qaeda."
"Somalis have no expertise to carry out this (kind of) attack, this was the work of foreigners," he said, calling for international aid to shore up government forces.
The head of the pro-government Islamic Courts militia, Ibrahim Maow, told reporters in Beledweyne that Somalia's former ambassador to Ethiopia, Abdulkarim Ibrahim Lakanyo, was among the dead.
Aden had been in his native town since earlier this week as part of a bid to claw back ground lost to the Shebab.
Aden's killing follows that of Mogadishu's top police commander, slain on Wednesday when at least 26 people lost their lives in the capital, half of them when a mortar shell hit a mosque.
EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana condemned the attack saying it was meant to "undermine the reconciliation" in the Horn of African nation.
Further fighting was reported Thursday in the capital's northern districts, where government forces have been trying to regain ground lost to the insurgents. Witnesses said three civilians were killed in the crossfire.
"I saw three bodies, one of them a woman. Eight others were wounded," said Karan resident Abdikarim Gutale.
Sharif is a former Islamist rebel who joined a UN-brokered peace process last year and was elected by parliament in January. His government forces have been battling the Shebab who want to impose a stricter form of Sharia law.
Nearly 300 people have been killed and more than 122,000 displaced since the Shebab stepped up its campaign to overthrow his shaky administration in early May.
The violence has brought the total number of refugees inside the country to 1.3 million, according to the UN.
Somalia has been gripped by civil wars and insurgencies and bereft of stable government since the overthrow of president Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991.
Copyright 2009 AFP Global Edition
