MOGADISHU: A suicide bomber disguised as a policeman blew himself up inside a police training camp in Somalia’s capital Mogadishu on Thursday and killed at least 18 officers, officials said.
Police spokesman Maj. Mohamed Hussein said the attacker strapped explosives to his body and infiltrated the General Kahiye Police Training Academy during an early morning parade.
“Police were preparing for the 74th anniversary of police day. As they wanted to start exercise, a suicide bomber came in and blew up himself. We lost 18 police officers and 15 others were injured,” Muktar Hussein Afrah, Somalia’s deputy police commander, told reporters at the blast scene.
“Police will always continue their work despite death.”
Police earlier put the death toll at 15.
Reuters witnesses who attempted to visit the site of the blast said police had sealed it off. Hours later when they were allowed in, a witness saw body parts suspected to be from the bomber on the ground in the field where police officers had been training.
The witness said the ground nearby had also been washed to remove blood stains and people were burying bodies at the police academy.
The militant group Al-Shabab claimed responsibility for the attack and gave a higher death toll.
“We killed 27 police (officers) and injured more,” Abdiasis Abu Musab, the group’s military operations spokesman, told Reuters. Al-Shabab carries out frequent bombings in Mogadishu and other towns.
The group, which is allied to Al-Qaeda, is waging an insurgency against the UN-backed government and its African Union (AU) allies in a bid to topple the weak administration.
The militants were driven out of Mogadishu in 2011 and have since been steadily losing territory to the combined forces of AU peacekeepers and Somali security forces.
On Tuesday, the US Africom said the US military had conducted an air strike on a vehicle they said was strapped with explosives some 65km southwest of Mogadishu.
Thursday’s attack comes at a time when the AU is finalizing plans to trim its peacekeeping mission called AMISOM.
The 22,000-strong AU force is scheduled to leave by 2020 and some security experts say Al-Shabab could find it easier to stage attacks as the peacekeeping forces are reduced because government forces will find it hard to replicate their work.
At the same time, Somalia could become a safe haven for militants linked to Al-Qaeda currently in Yemen, the experts said.
The peacekeepers were deployed to help secure a government that has struggled to establish central control in a country that plunged into civil war in the early 1990s.
18 police officers killed in Somalia suicide bomb attack
18 police officers killed in Somalia suicide bomb attack
Near record number of small boat migrants reach UK in 2025
- The second-highest annual number of migrants arrived on UK shores in small boats since records were started in 2018, the government was to confirm Thursday
LONDON: The second-highest annual number of migrants arrived on UK shores in small boats since records were started in 2018, the government was to confirm Thursday.
The tally comes as Brexit firebrand Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration party Reform UK surges in popularity ahead of bellwether local elections in May.
With Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer increasingly under pressure over the thorny issue, his interior minister Shabana Mahmood has proposed a drastic reduction in protections for refugees and the ending of automatic benefits for asylum seekers.
Home Office data as of midday on Wednesday showed a total of 41,472 migrants landed on England’s southern coast in 2025 after making the perilous Channel crossing from northern France.
The record of 45,774 arrivals was recorded in 2022 under the last Conservative government.
The Home Office is due to confirm the final figure for 2025 later Thursday.
Former Tory prime minister Rishi Sunak vowed to “stop the boats” when he was in power.
Ousted by Starmer in July 2024, he later said he regretted the slogan because it was too “stark” and “binary” and lacked sufficient context “for exactly how challenging” the goal was.
Adopting his own “smash the gangs” slogan, Starmer pledged to tackle the problem by dismantling the people smuggling networks running the crossings but has so far had no more success than his predecessor.
Reform has led Starmer’s Labour Party by double-digit margins in opinion polls for most of 2025.
In a New Year message, Farage predicted that if Reform got things “right” at the forthcoming local elections “we will go on and win the general election” due in 2029 at the latest.
Without addressing the migrant issue directly, he added: “We will then absolutely have a chance of fundamentally changing the whole system of government in Britain.”
In his own New Year message, Starmer insisted his government would “defeat the decline and division offered by others.”
Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch, meanwhile, urged people not to let “politics of grievance tell you that we’re destined to stay the same.”
- Protests -
The small boat figures come after Home Secretary Mahmood in November said irregular migration was “tearing our country apart.”
In early December, an interior ministry spokesperson called the number of small boat crossings “shameful” and said Mahmood’s “sweeping reforms” would remove the incentives driving the arrivals.
A returns deal with France had so far resulted in 153 people being removed from the UK to France and 134 being brought to the UK from France, border security and asylum minister Alex Norris said.
“Our landmark one-in one-out scheme means we can now send those who arrive on small boats back to France,” he said.
The past year has seen multiple protests in UK towns over the housing of migrants in hotels.
Amid growing anti-immigrant sentiment, in September up to 150,000 massed in central London for one of the largest-ever far-right protests in Britain, organized by activist Tommy Robinson.
Asylum claims in Britain are at a record high, with around 111,000 applications made in the year to June 2025, according to official figures as of mid-November.
Labour is currently taking inspiration from Denmark’s coalition government — led by the center-left Social Democrats — which has implemented some of the strictest migration policies in Europe.
Senior British officials recently visited the Scandinavian country, where successful asylum claims are at a 40-year low.
But the government’s plans will likely face opposition from Labour’s more left-wing lawmakers, fearing that the party is losing voters to progressive alternatives such as the Greens.
