At least 32 people have been killed and 63 injured in a suicide bombing and gun attack at a beach in the Somalia capital of Mogadishu, police said.
Police and witnesses told Agence France-Presse the bomber detonated his device late on Friday along Lido Beach before gunmen stormed the area, which is popular with businesspeople and officials and the scene of previous attacks.
Videos posted on X showed bodies lying on the beach in the dark, and people running to safety.
“Over 32 civilians died in the restaurant attack,” the police spokesperson Abdifatah Aden told a press conference. He said one attacker had blown himself up, three others had been killed, and one was captured.
Dr Abdikadir Abdirahmman, the director of the ambulance service, said the toll could rise.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility by the al-Qaida-linked al-Shabaab terrorist group, which has carried out similar attacks in the past.
The former prime minister Hassan Ali Khaire said on X: “The fact that the terrorist attack coincides with this night when the beach is the most congested shows the hostility of the terrorists to the Somali people.”
Witnesses said the area was busy when the explosion occurred.
“Everybody was panicked and it was hard to know what was happening because shooting started soon after the blast,” one witness, Abdilatif Ali, said.
People tried to take cover on the ground or flee, he said. “I saw many people strewn [on the ground] and some of them were dead and others wounded.”
Ahmed Yare saw the attack unfold from a nearby hotel.
“I saw wounded people at the beach side, people were screaming in panic, and it was hard to notice who was dead and who was still alive,” he said.
Al-Shabaab has carried out numerous bombings and attacks in Mogadishu and other parts of the country, as the government presses on with an offensive against the Islamist militants.
Five people were killed in a car bomb blast at a cafe in the capital last month. In March, the militants killed three people and wounded 27 in an hours-long siege of a Mogadishu hotel, breaking a relative lull in the fighting.
Al-Shabaab has been waging a bloody insurgency against Somalia’s fragile federal government for more than 17 years.