A Suicide Bomb in Somalia Brings Radical Islamist Takeover Closer

Weeks of heavy fighting in Somalia took an even deadlier turn Thursday when a suicide bomber drove a car full of explosives into the front of a hotel in the west of the country, killing Somalia's national security minister, a former ambassador and at least 20 others. Somalia's extremist Islamist militia, al Shabaab, said it carried out the attack.
The attack happened when a man steered a small car towards the gate of the Medina Hotel in Beledweyne, near the border with Ethiopia. The car veered into parked cars and exploded. National Security Minister Omar Hashi Aden and former Somali ambassador to Ethiopia Abdul Karim Farah Laqanyo were among those who died. "It was an act of terrorism and it is part of the terrorist attack on our people," Somali President Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed told journalists in the capital, Mogadishu. "Al-Qaeda is attacking us." (See pictures of 9/11.)
In the capital of neighboring Kenya, Somali Prime Minister Omar Abdirashid Ali Sharmarke said he had information that more than 100 people were killed. The attack underlined fears that Somalia is developing into a third front in the war against terrorism and militant Islam. It also was the bloodiest episode in two months of heavy fighting in which Sharif's beleaguered government has consistently ceded ground and lives to Sharif's former allies in Somalia's hardline Islamist movement. (See pictures of Somalia's pirates.)..more..http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20090619/wl_time/08599190573000