Blast in Somali capital kills 14, mostly women

By Abdi Sheikh

MOGADISHU (Reuters) - A roadside explosion in Mogadishu on Sunday killed at least 14 people, most of them women who were sweeping a street in the Somali capital, witnesses said. Nearly 50 people were wounded.

Residents said a remotely detonated device went off along a main road leading to the presidential palace where the street cleaners were working.

"We have now collected the pieces of nine dead women and still there are other parts scattered," witness Fardowsa Ahmed told Reuters.

"A minibus full of seriously injured women was rushed to hospital and I think the death toll will be more than this. Only two women who sell tea along the road survived," she added.

Islamist insurgents launch near-daily attacks on the transition administration and its Ethiopian military allies. The Horn of Africa nation has not had a functioning central government since 1991.

A rift has also opened within the interim administration between President Abdullahi Yusuf and Prime Minister Nur Hassan Hussein.

On Sunday, Hussein appointed five ministers and a deputy minister to replace cabinet members who quit.

"The government will be working as normal and we have no worries about those who resigned," he told reporters.

Ten of Somalia's 15 ministers said they were stepping down on Saturday over financial mismanagement by Hussein's administration.

Violence has killed more than 8,000 civilians and driven one million more from their homes in Somalia since allied Somali-Ethiopian forces kicked an Islamist group out of Mogadishu early last year.

Four victims of the attack on Sunday died in the emergency room at the main Madina hospital and another woman died later, bringing the death toll to 14, hospital officials said. They expected the number of dead to rise.

On Friday, a roadside bomb killed a Ugandan member of a small African Union peacekeeping force based in the capital.

(Additional reporting by Ibrahim Mohamed; Editing by Janet Lawrence)

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