Somalia pans UN official's death
2008-07-08 08:21
Addis Ababa - Somalia's Prime Minister on Monday accused insurgents of trying to "spoil" a truce deal signed last month between Mogadishu and its political foes as he condemned the killing of a top United Nations official in the capital on Sunday.
The head of the UN Development Programme, Osman Ali Ahmed, was shot at close-range as he left a mosque in the south of the city and later died while undergoing treatment at an African Union military hospital.
"Even though we have the transitional government, AU and Ethiopian forces in Somalia, people are still being killed selectively. Insurgents are trying to spoil the agreement signed in Djibouti," Nur Hassan Hussein told a press conference in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa.
"I'm very sorry that innocent people are being killed without any reason," added Hussein, who was in Ethiopia for a three-day trip to discuss bilateral issues with the Horn of Africa giant.
Radical cleric rejects deal
The government and the opposition umbrella group the Alliance for the Re-liberation of Somalia (ARS) reached a series of agreements at UN-sponsored talks in Djibouti in June, including a three-month truce, which was to come into force within a month.
But Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, an influential radical cleric whom Washington accused of links to al-Qaeda, had rejected the deal signed by ARS chief Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, saying it failed to set a clear deadline for the withdrawal of Ethiopian troops.
"The agreement includes the withdrawal of Ethiopian troops after a sufficient number of UN peacekeepers are deployed. What we are seeing now is that people are starting to hope that peace will come, they can have an influence on the insurgents," Hussein said.
Since their overthrow early last year by the joint Somali-Ethiopian force, the Islamists had waged a guerrilla war, which according to international rights groups and aid agencies, had left at least 6 000 civilians dead and displaced hundreds of thousands.
The 1991 ouster of dictator Mohammed Siad Barre paved the way for a breakdown of the state and a rise in factional warfare that had seen most of Somalia descend into chaos without any recognised central government in place ever since.