Al-Qaeda-linked al-Shabab militants have taken at least 20 people hostage in a restaurant in the Somali capital of Mogadishu after ramming an explosive-laden car into a hotel next door, claiming the lives of 11 people.

Security officials said the militants first rammed the car into the entrance of the Posh Hotel in the capital on Wednesday and then stormed the Pizza House restaurant, which is adjacent to the hotel and a popular venue for young citizens, according to Reuters.

The gunmen cut off electricity to complicate security forces’ efforts to end the siege, according to officials. Heavy gunfire was also heard. “The fighters are still inside Pizza House and they hold inside over 20 people. We do not know how many of those are dead or alive,” said Ibrahim Hussein, a police major.

Witnesses said security forces cordoned off the whole district surrounding the site of the incidents, and that the people inside the hotel had been safely evacuated. Other sources put the number of fatalities from car bomb attack on the hotel at 17. Somalia has been a scene of deadly clashes between government forces and al-Shabab militants since 2006.

The al-Shabab, an al-Qaeda-aligned militant group, was forced out of the capital by African Union troops in 2011 but still controls parts of the countryside and carries out attacks against government, military and civilian targets seemingly at will in Mogadishu and regional towns.

A particularly deadly Shabab strike on a busy market left 39 people dead in February, while a twin car bomb attack by the group on a popular Mogadishu hotel left 28 dead in January.

The Takfiri militant group is just one of the challenges facing the new Somali government, which is still struggling to expand its authority beyond the capital and other selected areas.

Source: Presstv

The civil disobedience campaign that was staged today Monday the 12^th of June across the thirteen counties in Southern Cameroon has reportedly been a huge success. Cameroon Concord News sources say ghost town operations frustrated the political GCE currently going on in West Cameroon. There were more soldiers and police officers on the streets today than students writing the General Certificate of Education examination.

Our correspondent in the Fako constituency hinted that not a single student took part in the GCE in Muyuka. We also gathered that some few Francophone students who showed up at the GBHS and CCAS Kumba centers were given snake beatings by members of a group calling for an independent state of Ambazonia. Our Kumba informant revealed that some 100 students guarded by approximately 200 soldiers participated in today’s GCE in Meme Division.

In Mamfe the chief town in Manyu Division, troops were deployed by the controversial SDO to the GBHS campus to provide security for some 40 Francophone students. There was also a huge police presence in GBHS Muea and Lycee Molyko for some few Francophones students. Many Francophone GCE candidates deserted GHS Buea campus for fear of a second bee attack.

By Sama Ernest

Cameroon Concord News

Eleven people were killed and more than 900 inmates escaped Sunday after unidentified assailants attacked a jail in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s restive east, an official said. “The Kangwayi prison in Beni was attacked at 3:30 pm (1330 GMT) by assailants whose identity is not yet known,” Julien Paluku, the governor of North Kivu Province, told reporters.

“In the exchange of fire between security forces and the attackers, authorities have (counted) 11 dead including eight members of the security forces,” Paluku said, adding, “For the moment, out of 966 prisoners, there are only 30 left in the prison.” Paluku said the Beni area and the neighboring town of Butembo had been put under curfew from 6:30 pm. “Only police officers and soldiers should be out from this time,” he said.

The attack came a day after the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) attacked a police station and a prosecutor’s office in the capital, Kinshasa, killing a police officer and seriously injuring four others after a series of similar strikes over the past three weeks. It also comes after two jailbreaks in the vast, unstable central African nation in the past month.

The violence has erupted as the Democratic Republic of the Congo is mired in a deep political crisis tied to President Joseph Kabila’s hold on power. Tension has been mounting across the vast mineral-rich nation of 71 million people since December last year, when Kabila’s second and final term officially ended.

Under a power-sharing agreement brokered by the influential Catholic Church on New Year’s Eve, Kabila is due to remain in office until elections at the end of 2017. However, Kabila earlier this month seemed to back away from the deal to hold a vote this year.

“I have not promised anything at all,” he told the German weekly Der Spiegel in a rare media interview. “I wish to organize elections as soon as possible.”

(Source: AFP)

At least eight refugees have drowned when their Europe-bound boat sank off Libya’s coast, a coastguard official says. The eight bodies were on an inflatable craft that can carry up to 120 passengers, said Colonel Fathi al-Rayani, head of the coastguard in Garabulli, 60 kilometers east of Tripoli.

He estimated that “at least 100” refugees were missing. The boat was spotted deflated off Garabulli, and the coastguard found the bodies inside, AFP reported. Conflict-ravaged Libya has long been a stepping stone for refugees seeking a better life in Europe.

The UN says around 61,250 refugees have reached Italy since the start of the year after crossing the Mediterranean, while 1,778 more are dead or missing. The Italian coastguard has said that more than 900 refugees were rescued off Libya on Thursday and Friday.

Libyan navy spokesman, General Ayoub Qassem, meanwhile told AFP that coastguards patrolling off Zawiya west of Tripoli on Friday intercepted five inflatables and two wooden boats with more than 570 refugees on board.

He said the boats were being escorted by five Libyans on a jet ski and two outboards, and that three of the men were apprehended. “The migrants are Africans, Bangladeshis, Egyptians, Moroccans … and were delivered to the detention center in Zawia,” Qassem said.

Intercepted or rescued refugees are often held in detention centers before being repatriated. People traffickers have exploited the chaos in Libya since the 2011 uprising deposed and killed former dictator Muammar Ghaddafi to boost their lucrative but deadly trade.

(Source: AFP)

Philemon Yang, the so-called Prime Minister and Head of Government has met with the Chadian Minister of Infrastructure, Transport and Civil Aviation. Yang held talks with the visiting Mr. Adoum Younousmi on the 8^th of June 2017 in the Star Building in Yaoundé.

Cameroon Concord News gathered the Chadian Minister was a special envoy of President Idriss Debby Itno. As usual, the Chadian member of government handed over a sealed message for onward transmission to President Paul Biya from Idriss Debby.

Speaking on state radio and television after the audience, Minister Adoum Younousmi said his discussions with Philemon Yang focused on the creation of a railway line between Cameroon and Chad. The railway investment project will add up to the existing road network to strengthen integration between both countries.

Source: CRTV

Militiamen have freed a French national and three Congolese who were kidnapped in March in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, the Interior Ministry says. They were among five workers, including a Tanzanian, who had been kidnapped from Banro, a Canadian gold mining corporation that runs two mines in DR Congo and is exploring for the mineral elsewhere in the vast, resource-rich country.

The Tanzanian had already been freed. The remaining four hostages were all freed on Saturday, the Congolese Interior Ministry said in a statement. French President Emmanuel Macron congratulated those involved in the release, “in particular Congo authorities for their mobilization and the effectiveness of their action,” according to a brief statement from his office. The French foreign ministry said it had no information on the identity of the attackers.

New York and Toronto-listed Banro’s four gold mines in eastern Congo have faced hazards both from illegal miners squatting on site and by armed groups that are a legacy of a regional conflict which officially ended in 2003. Armed robbers attacked Banro’s Twangiza gold mine in neighboring South Kivu province in February, killing three police officers.

Kidnappings are frequent in DR Congo’s east, which has suffered nearly two decades of brutal conflict, with neighboring states backing rebel groups in a civil war against Kinshasa’s authority, and roaming armed militia triggering the mass flight of terrorized civilians. The United Nations has 19,000 soldiers, police and military observers deployed in the DR Congo, its biggest and costliest peacekeeping mission, with an annual budget of $1.2 billion.

Three police officers were killed and two others injured when their vehicle ran over an improvised bomb near Kenya’s eastern border with Somalia, a Kenyan official said Wednesday. The police vehicle was moving from Kula Police Post toward the Liboi border town, North Eastern Regional Coordinator Mohamud Saleh said. He said three other officers were unhurt.

The incident came a day after Kenya’s police chief Joseph Boinnet announced al-Shabab extremists were stepping up attacks in the country. Boinnet said the Somalia-based al-Shabab is under pressure from African Union troops supporting Somalia’s weak government against the extremist group’s insurgency.

Al-Shabab, which has ties to al-Qaida, claimed responsibility for Wednesday’s attack in a report by its news agency and said it had killed at least five Kenyan police officers, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors extremist groups. In the last two weeks, attacks by al-Shabab in Kenya’s Garissa and Mandera counties have increased after a lull. Last week, an improvised bomb killed four people in a vehicle, including a minor.

Mandera County has been hardest hit in recent years by an al-Shabab campaign to avenge Kenyan troop presence in Somalia since 2011. Kenya’s troops are part of the AU force in Somalia. Kenya has managed to stop the frequency of al-Shabab attacks in its capital, Nairobi, and major towns, but human rights groups say the government uses methods such as extrajudicial killings that can fuel revenge attacks.

(Source: AP)

An organized crime group from the Central African Republic is spreading terror in the nation’s capital Yaoundé. Hundreds of Cameroonian students were victims of aggression by armed gangs at a place known as “Rail-Ngousso”, during a sporting event. The Central African Republic militia men arrived on board motorcycles armed with machetes, knives and guns and attacked students, robbing them of their cell phones, purses and various objects under the helpless gaze of the only policeman committed to surveillance, but unarmed.

Cameroon Concord News understands some of the victims of the Tuesday attack were rushed to the Gynecological Hospital in Ngousso. Our informant hinted that “One of them, even died.” According to police sources in, the attack carries the DNA of militiamen from the Central African Republic who are residing in Yaoundé as refugees.

A journalist with a sister publication, Cameroon Intelligence Report revealed that among the more than 265,000 Central African refugees gathered in Cameroon are many militiamen, accustomed to the use of firearms and heavy weapons.

A angry police boss was quoted as saying that “Cameroon does not offer enough opportunities to its own children. What opportunities can she offer these Central African refugees?”  The senior police officer who sued for anonymity was again heard murmuring privately that what was Biya thinking to have accepted 265,000 foreigners to come and live here?

Cameroon has now become the sleeping cells for Central African Republic armed gangs as Douala and Yaounde are witnessing an increasing crime rate.  The members of the CAR sleeping cells were recruited from the Seleka and Anti Balaka militia. Without activities, these “refugees” engage in gangs and armed attacks, which are now, worrying the Cameroonians and could be at the origin of the rise of Xenophobia.

By Chi Prudence Asong

Cameroon Concord News

The Cameroonian military has confirmed the arrest of eight of its soldiers in Chad by the Chadian army. The members of the Rapid Intervention Battalion were picked up in Mayo Kebi-East; a region located more than 300 km south of the Chadian capital Ndjamena.

The communications department at the Ministry of Defense in Yaoundé refused to provide details of the incident but hoped for a happy outcome.

Yaoundé and Ndjamena have good relations and are fighting together against the Nigerian sect Boko Haram, which has pledged allegiance to the organization of the Islamic state and now calls itself the Islamic province of West Africa.

According to our sources, the arrested soldiers were part of a detachment operating under the banner of the Joint Multinational Force in Lake Chad. The troops were inside a Toyota pick-up vehicle before they were rounded up by elements of the Chadian army.

Cameroon Concord News gathered that the soldiers entered Chad without an order of mission from their hierarchy. Negotiations are underway for the Cameroonian troops to gain their freedom.

By Sama Ernest

An average of 4,600 people flee their homes every day in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the UN says, warning of a dramatically deteriorating humanitarian situation in the country. A full 3.7 million people were displaced within DR Congo by the end of March – more than double the 1.6 million at the start of 2016, the United Nations humanitarian agency OCHA said. “This is a massive, massive deterioration,” Rein Paulsen, who heads OCHA’s country office in DR Congo, told reporters in Geneva.

The situation is particularly dire in the central Kasai region, where spiraling violence between government troops and tribal militias has forced 1.27 million people from their homes since last September, he said. “That’s an increase of 100,000 in the last week,” Paulsen said, describing the numbers as “shocking and dramatic.”

The fighting in Kasai erupted after government troops last August killed tribal chief Jean Pierre Mpandi, also known as Kamwina Nsapu, who had launched an uprising against President Joseph Kabila. Violence in the region has left at least 400 people dead since September. The UN has meanwhile reported finding 40 mass graves, while two UN researchers – Michael Sharp, an American, and Zaida Catalan, a dual Swedish-Chilean national – investigating the violence were abducted and shot dead. One of the victims was also beheaded.

Source: AFP