MOGADISHU, Fighting between al Shabaab fighters and Somali government troops and African Union peacekeepers killed 24 people on Sunday, a regional official said, with the militants putting the death toll higher.

Al Shabaab ambushed a convoy carrying troops from the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) early on Sunday in the Bulamareer district of the Lower Shabelle region, about 140 km southwest of Mogadishu, Colonel Hassan Mohamed said.

Ali Nur, the deputy governor of Lower Shabelle region, said: “We have carried 23 dead AMISOM soldiers and a dead Somali soldier from the scene where al Shabaab ambushed AMISOM today,”

Abdiasis Abu Musab, al Shabaab’s military operations spokesman, said: “We have in hand 39 dead bodies of AU soldiers including their commander.”

The numbers al Shabaab and officials give usually differ.

Uganda’s defence ministry said its soldiers were part of the AMISOM convoy and an unspecified number of its soldiers had been killed.

Meanwhile, a car bomb exploded Sunday near a police station in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, killing at least six people and wounding another 13, police and witnesses said.

The bomb detonated as the car was driving in the busy Maka al Mukaram road.

“The death toll may rise. Most of the injured ones are very serious,” police officer, Mohamed Hussein, said.

Rescue workers and civilians carried bloodied bodies and injured victims to hospitals.

The blast occurred amid a traffic jam while soldiers were searching cars at a nearby intersection.

Most of the victims are civilians.

No group has claimed responsibility for the apparent attack.

Somalia’s Prime Minister Hassan Ali Khaire said no such blast had taken place in the capital for a month.

Source: NAM NEWS NETWORK