SA-based BBC journalist shot

2005-02-09 19:12

Mogadishu - A journalist working for the BBC was on Wednesday shot and wounded by unidentified gunmen outside her hotel in the capital of Somalia, a country wracked by 14 years of interclan fighting, said police and medical officials.

Katie Herman, a producer based in Johannesburg, was rushed to hospital and was undergoing surgery in Mogadishu with two bullets lodged in her back, but was in stable condition, medical sources said.

Witnesses said the gunmen, who speed off in a white car, targeted her about 20m from the Sahafi Hotel in southern Mogadishu.

Somali acting police chief Mohammed Warsame Dole said the vehicle was found abandoned in the Barmuda neighbourhood of central Mogadishu.

Doleh said: "Since we got the vehicle used by the attackers, it will be easy for us to locate the gunmen and the owner of the vehicle."

Herman arrived in the Somali capital early on Wednesday to join foreign reporters who are covering a government team that is assessing conditions in the capital, ahead of the Somali government's relocation to Mogadishu from Nairobi.

Transitional Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, his government led by Mohammed Ali Gedi and the parliament have been based in Nairobi since they came to power few months ago amid continued fears of instability in Somalia.

The country of about 10 million people has been a theatre of anarchic bloodletting since Mohammed Siad Barre was toppled in 1991, plunging the nation into a patchwork of fiefdoms governed by unruly warlords.

Between 1993 and 1998, 10 journalists were killed in Somalia, either by mob attacks, shootings or knifings.

Nine of them were foreign correspondents killed between 1993 and 1995, when the United Nations and United States sent missions that failed to restore stability in the country owing to violent animosity with local warlords.

In clashes that ensued, thousands of Somalis died along with 140 UN peacekeepers as well as 18 US special forces.

- AFP