Thursday, April 8, 2010

Somali Islamist insurgents burn food aid

Al Shabab militants fighting the Somali government on Thursday burned nearly 160 sacks of food aid owned by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in the city of Buulobarde, about 219 kilometres north of the capital, Mogadishu.

The Al Shabab regional governor in the central Hiiraan region who talked to reporters said the food aid was being burned because it had already expired and he said the “Christians” wanted to poison the Somali people.

“We have burned 159 sacks of different kinds of food that have already expired and became dirty. For a along time in the past, we have been examining the food and we realized that it has expired,” Sheikh Yusuf Ali Ugaas said Thursday.

A local ICRC staff told APA on condition of anonymity that the food aid was intended to be distributed to the needy people in the city this week.

“They asked us to come and watch how they were burning the food while we needed it,” a resident in the city who confined his name only as Abdisalam because of security reasons told APA by telephone.

Earlier in the day, militants from the same group took over the UN food agency compound in southern Somalia where they looted all equipment and food aid tored in the compound after they prevented the UN agency from handing out the food to the needy people in the city of Waajid and surrounding villages in February this year.

Source: APA

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