JAKARTA - A car bomb and shooting attack at a Kismayu City hotel, Somalia, killed nine people on Sunday before security forces ended the siege at the hotel and killed the attackers, a regional official said.
Shots erupted after an explosive vehicle crashed into the gate of the port city's Tawakal Hotel. The al Shabaab militant group linked to al-Qaeda said it had carried out the attack.
"In the explosion, nine people including students and civilians were killed and 47 others injured, some of whom were serious," Jubbaland Security Minister Yussuf Hussein Dhumal told Reuters.
"The site of the explosion occurred near the school, so many students were injured," he continued.
Security forces killed three attackers and the fourth killed in the bomb blast, Dhumal said.
Prior to the attack, a meeting was held at the hotel to plan how to combat al Shabaab, Farah Mohamed, a security officer, said of Kismayu.
Meanwhile, Mohamed Nur, a police captain and Farah Ali, a shopkeeper in Kismayu, told the hotel's explosion preceded the shot.
Video footage from Somalia's National Television posted on its Twitter account shows security personnel loading one of the injured into the ambulance.
Separately, Abdiasis Abu Musab, spokesman for the military operations al Shabaab, said the group was behind the attack, which he said targeted administrators of the Jubbaland region working from the hotel.
Kismayu is the commercial capital of Jubbaland, a southern Somali region that is partly still controlled by al Shabaab.
Al Shabaab was expelled from Kismayu in 2012. Meanwhile, the city's port has become a major source of income for the group from taxes, charcoal exports and weapons levies and other illegal imports.
In 2019, a similar attack on another hotel in Kismayu killed at least 26 people.
The group is battling to overthrow Somalia's central government, imposing its own rules based on a rigorous interpretation of Sharia law. The group has killed thousands of Somalians and hundreds of civilians across East Africa in a decade-long uprising.
Meanwhile, Somalia's security forces said they had benefited on the battlefield against al Shabaab in recent weeks, while fighting alongside local martial groups, but the group continued to carry out deadly attacks.
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