Shebab flag torched
AFP/News24, South Africa
Mogadishu - Protesters in Mogadishu torched flags bearing the al-Qaeda linked Shebab group's colours on Monday as hundreds gathered for an unprecedented demonstration against the hardline insurgent group.
The demonstrators staged a march from a hotel where a suicide bomber killed 24 people last week, including three government ministers and three journalists, during a graduation ceremony in one of the country's most devastating attacks.
The protesters chanted slogans "Down with Al-Shebab" and "We don't need violence", and blamed the deadly explosion on the radical Islamist movement.
The march made a stop at Banadir University, which lost several newly-graduated medical students in the bombing.
"Hundreds of Mogadishu residents, many of them women and children, have spontaneously organised this rally. The people are fed up with indiscriminate killings by terrorists," police officer Farah Osman Kalafoge told AFP.
"I joined the rally near Zobe junction to show my resentment against the cruel act that killed the future doctors and journalists," said Mohamed Yare, one of the demonstrators.
The demonstration against the Shebab, a group which is increasingly adopting al- Qaeda's jihadist ideology, is the first such public protest in Mogadishu, where publicly opposing the movement can be a death sentence.