Al-Shabaab militants execute two young men in public

MOGADISHU, Sunday

Two young men were today executed in public at Maka, 110 km south of Mogadishu by the al-Shabaab authority in Lower Shabelle region.

The men had been sentenced by an Islamic court run by the movement.

Al-Shabaab officials at SYL Football Stadium, where the firing squad took place, said that the men were apprehended three months ago.

They also said that Mohamed Hussein Ahmed, who came from Marka and Hussein Aba Ali from Mogadishu, pleaded guilty to charges of spying for the Transitional Federal Government.

Were spying

Sheikh Suldan Ala Mohamed, the Lower Shabelle Islamist Authority’s education and promotion officer, said that Ahmed, 20 and Aba Ali, 21, were spying for the TFG.

“We have been holding them for three months. We investigated and they confessed.”

Residents of Marka confirmed that al-Shabaab loyalists had been moving around the town on Saturday evening inviting people through loudhailers to come to the stadium to witness the execution.

Consequently, hundreds of people turned up to witness the mid-morning execution.

Schools in the coastal town suspended classes so that students could go to the stadium for the occasion.

Similar executions for alleged spying for the TFG and even for Western agencies have occurred in parts of Somalia controlled by Islamists opposing the government.

Kismayu, Mogadishu and other towns have been the scenes of people facing firing squads.

The US says the group, which wants to topple President Sheikh Sharif Ahmed’s fragile UN-backed government and impose its own strict version of Islamic law, is al-Qaeda’s proxy in the failed Horn of Africa state.

Courts run by al-Shabaab clerics have ordered executions, floggings and amputations in recent months, mostly in Kismayu further south, but also in rebel-held districts of the capital.