MOGADISHU, Somalia - Multiple explosions and a firefight broke out near the presidential palace in the Somalian capital on Friday in a deadly militant attack on the heart of the government.
“Terrorists tried to attack the presidential palace, and the security forces foiled the attack,” Abdikarim Hussein Guled, the minister of the interior and national security, told state media. Two government officials were killed, the Interior Ministry said.
The United Nations’ top envoy to the country said in a message on Twitter that the Somali president, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, had survived the attack on the palace, known as Villa Somalia.
“President just called me to say he’s unharmed,” said Nicholas Kay, the United Nations’ special representative for Somalia. “Attack on Villa #Somalia had failed. Sadly some lives lost. I condemn strongly this terrorism.”
Police Capt. Mohamed Hussein said the attack began with a car bomb, followed by militants attempting to shoot their way into the compound, where the president and the speaker of the parliament reside and have their offices.
“Somali National Security Forces foiled cowardly attack outside Villa #Somalia,” said the African Union mission in Somalia, known as Amisom, in a Twitter message after the attack. “Senseless attack was directed on innocent civilians as Friday prayers were underway in Mosques.”
The Interior Ministry displayed seven bloodied and dead bodies of the attackers and said two others blew themselves up. The wreckage of two car bombs lay nearby.
The two others killed were a former intelligence commander and an aide to the prime minister, a Somali-American named Mohamud Hersi Abdulle, Hussein said.
A spokesman for the Somali militant group al-Shabab claimed responsibility for the attack.
“Our commandos have attacked the so-called presidential palace in order to kill or arrest those who are inside,” al-Shabab military spokesman Sheikh Abdul Aziz Abu Musab said.
Weapons meant for the Somali army could have been used by the militants in Friday’s attack. A confidential U.N. Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea reported this month that the country’s military is selling weaponry in markets where the al-Qaida-linked militants buy weapons.
In at least one case weapons were sold by a military commander directly to an al-Shabab commander, the report said.
Somalia’s government has not responded publicly to the report and did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.
Al-Shabab came to prominence as a nationalist movement combating the U.S.-backed Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in 2006. The group seized control of large areas of the country, including Mogadishu.
Somali troops and African Union forces pushed the militants back in recent years, but they have been unable to stem the tide of terrorist and guerrilla-style attacks.
The tactics used in Friday’s attack have become all too familiar to security personnel in Somalia. On New Year’s Day a similar assault killed half a dozen or more people at the Jazeera Hotel in Mogadishu. In June, militants detonated a pickup in front of the U.N. compound, then stormed the facility, killing at least 15 people.
Police stations, the court complex in Mogadishu and restaurants popular with peacekeepers and government officials have been targeted. Al-Shabab demonstrated that it could project power beyond Somalia’s borders when militants armed with AK-47’s carried out a bloody siege at the Westgate shopping mall in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, in September, killing more than 60 men, women and children.
In November the U.N. Security Council authorized an increase of more than 4,000 peacekeepers in Somalia, bringing the number of African peacekeepers there to more than 22,000 while also expanding logistical support for the fight against the militants.
The Pentagon in December sent a small team of uniformed military advisers to Somalia to help provide logistics, planning and communications assistance to Somali and other African forces combating the group. They are the first U.S. troops there since 1993, when 18 Americans were killed.
“This is another desperate and criminal act which does nothing but harm to the people of Somalia,” Kay, the U.N. special representative, said in a statement Friday. “The Somali people are tired of shootings, bombings and killings. It’s time for a new chapter in Somalia’s history, and we cannot allow a slide back at this critical time.”
Villa Somalia said in a Twitter statement, “Don’t be fooled by this ‘media spectacular’. This is another act of desperation from a dying animal.” Information for this article was contributed by Mohammed Ibrahim and Nicholas Kulish of The New York Times and by Abdi Guled and Jason Straziuso of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 2 on 02/22/2014