Somalis loot food aid trucks

2008-03-29 13:18

Mogadishu - Somalis uprooted by fighting in Mogadishu looted trucks carrying United Nations food aid on Friday, peacekeepers said, highlighting what relief agencies warned was a fast deteriorating humanitarian catastrophe.

Somalia now has one million internal refugees, aid workers say, and their numbers increase by an exodus of some 20 000 civilians each month from the capital, where Islamist insurgents were battling the Ethiopian-backed government.

Captain Clement Cimana, spokesperson for a small African Union peacekeeping force in the coastal city, said the displaced residents targeted trucks carrying supplies for the UN World Food Programme (WFP) before local police restored order.

"They also blocked the main road, showing their anger," he told Reuters. "They said they always see WFP-chartered trucks full of food passing in front of them while they are hungry."

Small plane crashes

A WFP spokesperson in Somalia said relatively small amounts of sorghum and vegetable oil had been stolen, but that almost all the food had subsequently been recovered.

Aid agencies said record high food prices, hyper-inflation and drought across the country were exacerbating the crisis and would worsen if seasonal rains due next month failed as expected.

Meanwhile, police and witnesses in Merka, south of Mogadishu, said a small unmanned plane had crashed near the coast. Local media speculated it was a United States surveillance drone controlled from a warship in the Indian Ocean.

The US military had launched several air strikes in Somalia in recent months, targeting al-Qaeda suspects including the bombers of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.

'We are preparing for America'

A Somali jihadist group calling itself the Young Mujahideen Movement issued a Web message on Friday referring to a US spy plane that "fell in the city of Merka" and threatening the US, according to the SITE Institute, a US-based monitoring service.

"We are preparing for America ... what will make them forget the blessed attacks in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam," the SITE Institute translation, monitored in London, said. It said the message was distributed by the Global Islamic Media Front.

Remnants of a hardline Islamist administration that was driven from Mogadishu in late 2006 were blamed for an Iraq-style insurgency of assassinations and roadside bombings that killed 6 500 people last year in Somalia's capital alone.

Residents said a civilian was killed on Friday and several wounded after Ethiopian troops opened fire at a bus that had a gunman aboard.

"The soldiers shot to stop the vehicle," witness Mohamed Omar said. "One passenger was armed with a pistol and fired at them. ... As a result, they shot directly at the bus."

The violence, including attacks on humanitarian workers, had limited access to victims, 40 aid agencies said this week.

- Reuters