Al-Qaeda suicide bombers behind Somali assassination bid

BAIDOA, Somalia (AFP) - An unsuccessful bid to assassinate Somalia's interim president was an Al-Qaeda-hatched plot involving the country's first-ever suicide car-bombing, a senior Somali official said. The official, a top security officer in President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed's office, said two well-planned blasts, including one from a vehicle driven by a suicide attacker, had hit the temporary government seat of Baidoa. "There were two explosions near parliament, one was (a) car packed with explosives and the other was driven by a suicide bomber," the official told AFP on condition of anonymity. "Undeniably, this is the work of international terrorism sponsored by Al-Qaeda," the official said of the blasts and an ensuing gunbattle between presumed attackers and security forces that killed at least 11 people. Cars burn after an exlosion following assasination attempt on Somali interim president Abdullahi Yusuf, himself, said he had been targeted by two explosions, at least one of which was a suicide blast, as he left the parliament building in Baidoa in a convoy but declined to speculate on who might have been behind it. "The attack was a suicide car bomb against me," he said in an interview with the BBC Somali language radio service. "The first car exploded 300-500 metres (yards) from the car I was riding in. "The suicide car hit the first car in the convoy and exploded, a fireball then came up to my car and forced me to change cars, that is when another bomb in a second car exploded," the president said. "It is the first time that we have had a suicide bomb in Somalia," Yusuf said, refusing at the same time to speculate on who might have been behind the attack, maintaining it was too early to assess blame. A Somali presidential guard keeps watch under his country's flag in Baido Somalia, an overwhelmingly moderate Muslim nation, has been a theater of insecurity for the past 16 years but has never before been hit by a suicide bombing, according to experts. The senior security official said the coordinated attack bore the hallmarks of Osama bin Laden's terrorist network with which the country's powerful Islamist movement is accused of links. "This was planned long ago because within one day, the terrorists could not have arranged this kind of a sophisticated attack against the government of Somalia," the official said. "The aim was to kill the head of state and other government officials and interrupt the democratic movement of the transitional federal parliament," he told AFP.
Baidoa, the current home of the government about 250 kilometers (155 miles) northwest of Mogadishu, which was seized by the Islamists in June after months of fierce battles.
Somalia, a Horn of Africa nation of some 10 million, has been without a central authority since it was plunged into anarchy with the 1991 ouster of strongman Mohamed Siad Barre.