Car bomb blast at Mogadishu cafe during Euro 2024 final kills 5, injures 20

Five people were killed in a car bomb blast at a cafe in the Somalia capital Mogadishu where football fans were watching the Euro 2024 final late Sunday, local media said, citing police.

“Preliminary police reports confirm five fatalities and around 20 injuries,” the Somali National News Agency reported police spokesman Major Abdifitah Aden Hassan as telling state media. Somali National Television gave the same information.

Police have cordoned off the area, which is close to the presidential palace compound known as Villa Somalia and was very busy at the time of the blast.

Images posted online showed a huge fireball and plumes of smoke billowing into the night sky over the city.

Several local media reports said the blast was caused by a suicide bomber or a car bomb but the information could not be verified.

The authorities have not yet made any public comment on the incident.

The al-Qaeda linked al-Shabaab extremist group has been waging a bloody insurgency against Somalia’s fragile federal government for more than 17 years and has carried out numerous bombings in Mogadishu and other parts of the country.

There had been a relative lull in attacks in recent months as the government presses on with an offensive against the extremist militants.

But on Saturday, five inmates said to be al-Shabaab fighters were killed in a shootout with prison guards in an attempted jail break from the main prison in Mogadishu.

Three guards were also killed and 18 others wounded in the confrontation, prison officials said, after the prisoners managed to get hold of weapons.

Somalia’s President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud has vowed “all-out” war against the extremists and government troops have joined forces with local clan militias in a military campaign supported by an African Union force and US air strikes.

But the offensive has suffered setbacks, with Al-Shabaab earlier this year claiming it had taken multiple locations in the centre of the country.

Although driven out of the capital by AU forces in 2011, Al-Shabaab still has a strong presence in rural Somalia.

It has carried out repeated attacks against political, security and civilian targets, mostly in Somalia but also in neighboring countries including Kenya.

Somalia last month called for the African Union to slow the planned withdrawal of its forces from the troubled country.

UN resolutions called for troop numbers in the AU peacekeeping mission, known as ATMIS, to be reduced to zero by December 31 with security handed over to the Somali army and police.

The third and penultimate phase was to see the departure of 4,000 soldiers out of a total 13,500 ATMIS troops by the end of June.

But, following a request from Somalia’s government to see only 2,000 troops leave in June and the remaining 2,000 in September, the AU Peace and Security Council said it “strongly supports... a phased approach” to the drawdown.