20 killed in Mogadishu bomb carnage

A roadside bomb caused carnage in Somalia yesterday with a group of women sweeping a Mogadishu street "torn to pieces" amid a body count of at least 20 civilians, according to witnesses and medics.
"They were cleaning the street when this huge explosion rocked the entire neighbourhood. I counted 15 bodies, most of them are women who were torn to pieces," eyewitness Hasan Abdi Mohamed said.
Mohamed said the explosion -- one of the deadliest to hit civilians in the restive Somali capital in weeks -- wounded around 40 people.
Local residents rushed to help the injured, with another witness, Ali Hasan Adan also counting about 15 dead.
"There is blood everywhere, dead and wounded people strewn across the street," Adan said.
"This is a tragedy, I have never seen such carnage. From what I can see, they are all women who were cleaning the area."
At the city's main Madina hospital, Doctor Dahir Mohamed Mohamoud told AFP that five of those brought in died of their injuries, bringing the death toll to at least 20.
"We received 47 civilians who were injured in the blast and so far five have died in the hospital, three of them women," said Mohamoud, one of the hospital's directors.
"It's the largest number of civilians we have received from one incident in weeks," he added.
At the hospital, Shamso Mumin discovered that her sister was one of the victims of the explosion.
"My sister leaves three orphans behind. She had been doing this kind of work for three months but now she has lost everything, she has lost her life," she said, sobbing.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the explosion but hardline Islamist groups have routinely targeted military convoys in the area with roadside bombs.
Ethiopian troops came to the rescue of Somalia's embattled and internationally-backed transitional government in late 2006, ousting an Islamist militia that had briefly controlled large parts of the country.
Islamist insurgents have since waged a deadly guerrilla war against government targets, Ethiopian forces and African Union peacekeepers.
Civilians have borne the brunt of the fighting, with international rights groups and aid agencies saying that at least 6,000 have been killed and hundreds of thousands displaced over the past year alone.
The Horn of Africa nation has been plagued by civil fighting and defied more than a dozen peace initiatives since the 1991 overthrow of former president Mohamed Siad Barre led to chaos.