(VOA)-Somali militant group al-Shabab has claimed responsibility for an attack in the town of Baidoa Thursday that left at least 12 people dead.
The attack targeted the official residence and headquarters of Sharif Hassan Sheikh Aden, a former speaker of Somalia’s parliament and the current head of Somalia’s South Western region.
Witnesses said militants detonated a car bomb outside the residence, then opened fire, setting off a gunbattle with guards.
Regional police commissioner Colonel Mahad Abdiraham told VOA’s Somali Service that the 12 dead include eight attackers, three Somali soldiers and one Ethiopian soldier with the African Union force in Somalia, AMISOM. He said three other people were wounded.
Aden is said to be safe and unharmed.
Pro-al-Shabab websites reported the group’s claim of responsibility soon after the attack was over.
Government officials targeted
The assault was similar to other recent attacks by the al-Qaida-linked group, which has increasingly targeted government officials.
Al-Shabab has claimed responsibility for killing six members of parliament since the start of 2014, and also launched two bomb-and-gun attacks on the presidential palace last year.
In November Baidoa became the capital of Somalia’s newly created South West State and the seat of its president, Aden, a key ally of the country’s internationally backed government.
Al-Shabab controlled much of Mogadishu from 2007 to 2011 but has been pushed out of Somalia’s capital and other major cities by African Union forces.
On Wednesday evening one person was killed in a suspected Shebab car bomb attack against a popular hotel in Mogadishu, an attack that came several weeks after the Islamists carried out a suicide raid against another hotel in the city, killing at least 25 people.
The group has also carried out a string of revenge attacks in neighboring countries, including the September 2013 attack on the Westgate shopping mall in the Kenyan capital Nairobi that left at least 67 dead.
Somalia has been unstable since the collapse of Siad Barre’s hardline regime in 1991, and the country’s new government is being supported by a 22,000-strong African Union force that includes troops from Burundi, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda.
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