The REAL Al-Shabab in action

Al-Shabab guerrillas cheered by Mogadishu residents, Oct. 30, 2009.

On the afternoon of Aug. 24, 2010, the militant Somali group Al-Shabab launched a surprise attack on a hotel in central Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia. Two suicide bombers blew themselves up at the Muna Hotel, a hotel in Mogadishu frequented by government and military officials and located in the zone controlled and guarded by the Uganda-led African Union peacekeeping force, AMISOM. It was the most serious suicide bomb attack in any part of Africa since the July 11, 2010 bomb blasts in the Ugandan capital Kampala. The nature of this attack in Mogadishu offers investigators, the media and other observers a further batch of clues into the July bomb blasts in Kampala in which 76 people are reported to have died. At the time and long after, Al-Shabab is widely believed to have been the mastermind of the Kampala bombings. The Uganda Record was the only news media that questioned this widely-held belief.  Read More