A suicide bomber has blown himself up at the gates of the presidential palace in the Somali capital Mogadishu in the latest attack by al Qaeda-linked rebels, police say, according to Al Jazeera Net Tuesday.
The bomber, armed with an automatic rifle, tried to jump onto an armoured vehicle in a convoy of African Union (AU) peacekeepers driving into the palace grounds on Monday, said Osman Aden, a police spokesman.
When the AU troops fired at the bomber to stop him jumping onto the vehicle, he threw a grenade at them and then detonated his explosive device, Osman said.
The attacker has been identified as a former interior ministry security guard who had defected to al Shabaab, a rebel group linked to al Qaeda, he said.
“Fortunately only two of our soldiers were slightly wounded by shrapnel,” he said. “The soldiers were on a small top building at the gate of the palace.”
Al Shabaab has been fighting the fragile transitional government of President Sheikh Sharif Ahmed for three years and now controls much of Mogadishu and huge tracts of southern and central Somalia.
