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{The trial of four men charged in connection with Kenya’s Westgate Mall massacre, an attack claimed by Somalia’s al-Qaeda-linked Shebab group, has started.}

Adan Mohamed Abidkadir Adan, Mohamed Ahmed Abdi, Liban Abdullah Omar and Hussein Hassan Mustafah all pleaded not guilty to charges of “supporting a terrorist group” on Wednesday.

The men have been accused of supporting the gunmen who carried out the September attack that killed at least 67 people.

In court, witness Stephen Juma described how he had been directing traffic outside the mall when a car pulled up to the building and three men leapt out.

“I began to hear gunshots, I made a radio call for help while running to the main entrance,” Juma said. “I took shelter in a residential compound until when I saw policemen come,” adding that he had not seen the faces of the three men.

A warning to Kenya

Security forces initially reported that a dozen gunmen carried out the attack, but now it is thought that there were only four gunmen.

Two of the shooters are named in court documents as Mohammed Abdinur Said and Hassan Abdi Dhuhulow, a 23-year-old Somali who spent time in Norway.

It is believed that all attackers were killed in the siege. Interpol and the FBI have assisted Kenya in trying to identify four bodies believed to be those of the attackers. But a New York police report said a lack of evidence could mean the attackers escaped.

Al-Shebab said the gunmen came from a special suicide commando brigade and that the attack was a warning to Kenya to pull its troops out of southern Somalia, where they are fighting the group as part of an African Union force.

Western officials have said that as many as 94 people could have died in total in the mall attack, as bodies were buried under tonnes of rubble after part of the mall’s roof collapsed at the end of the raid following an intense fire that burned for weeks.

Source:
AFP

{A senior UN official has given warning of the risk of genocide in the Central African Republic without a more robust international response to communal bloodshed in which at least eight more people have died.}

John Ging, director of operations for the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), said on Thursday that the crisis was foreseeable and stemmed from many years of international neglect.

“The stakes are extremely high,” he said after returning from a five-day trip to the country.

“It has all the elements that we have seen elsewhere in places like Rwanda and Bosnia,” he said.

“The elements are there, the seeds are there for a genocide, there’s no question about that.”

The former French colony descended into chaos after a mostly Muslim rebel coalition, Seleka, seized power in March, unleashing a wave of killings and looting that spurred revenge attacks by Christian militia known as “anti-balaka” (anti-machete).

More than a million people have been displaced by the violence since Seleka installed their leader Michel Djotodia as interim president.

Up to 1,000 people were killed last month alone in the capital Bangui, prompting neighbouring countries to evacuate more than 30,000 of their citizens.

However, with swift intervention the country’s dire situation could be reversed, Ging said.

“This one is not a hopeless case,” he said. “The consequences will be dramatic if we don’t act immediately and effectively.”

There has been relative calm since Djotodia resigned last week under intense international pressure, but sporadic violence has persisted in Bangui.

On Thursday, a spokesman for a 15,000-strong group of anti-balaka criticised the interim government and threatened a return to violence if it was not overhauled.

CAR is designated by the UN as one of the top three global humanitarian emergencies, along with Syria and the Philippines. But a UN appeal has received only six percent of a $247m target.

France hurriedly sent some 1,600 troops to its former colony in December.

The deployment of Rwandan troops, the first of whom arrived aboard a US military aircraft on Thursday, will increase the African Union contingent to more than 5,000 peacekeepers this month.

Source:
Al Jazeera and agencies

Uganda’s president says his troops have joined forces with the South Sudanese military and are fighting in Bor to end a rebellion in the world’s newest country.

Lieutenant Colonel Paddy Ankunda, the military spokesman, said on Thursday that Ugandan forces were helping loyalist forces flush rebels out of Bor, the strategic town near the capital of Juba that has seen some of the fiercest clashes since violence broke out in South Sudan in mid-December.

Ugandan officials have previously denied that their troops have joined the fight, saying their forces were deployed in South Sudan mainly to aid civilian evacuations.

The involvement of a foreign army in South Sudan’s conflict could escalate a crisis set off by a power struggle between President Salva Kiir and Riek Machar, the fugitive former deputy president who commands rebel forces.

It comes a day after Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, admitted for the first time to helping his South Sudanese counterpart fend off the rebellion.

Uganda’s troop involvement in combat in South Sudan could raise concerns that other regional countries could be sucked into the conflict, fighting their own proxy wars as has happened elsewhere on the continent, such as Congo.

A spokesman for the prime minister of Ethiopia, where peace talks are taking place, said earlier this month having Ugandan troops engaged in combat would be “absolutely unwarranted”.

“Only the other day, Jan. 13, the SPLA and elements of our army had a big battle with these rebel troops at a point about 90km from Juba,” Museveni said.

“We inflicted a big defeat on them. Unfortunately, many lives were lost on the side of the rebels. We also took casualties and also had some dead.”

Kuol Manyang, South Sudan’s defence minister, said the Ugandan forces in his country numbered “a battalion”, and that
they were there to help quell the rebellion by Machar.

Aljazeera