Somali lawmaker and prominent singer-songwriter Saado Ali Warsame was shot dead Wednesday in the capital Mogadishu in the latest attack by Shebab insurgents against the government, police and witnesses said. The shooting, with gunmen spraying her car with bullets before escaping, is the latest in a string of shootings or bombings targeting government officials.
Witnesses said armed men ambushed Warsame's car as it was travelling in the south of the capital, killing her and her driver. "Lawmaker Saado Ali Warsame was killed with her driver," police officer Mohamed Hassan said. Warsame is the fourth Somali lawmaker to be killed since the start of the year. Somalia's al Qaeda-linked Shebab, who threatened earlier this year to kill the country's MPs "one by one", claimed responsibility for the attack.
"She was killed because she was an MP - all the lawmakers are sentenced to death until they leave parliament," Shebab spokesman Abdulaziz Abu Musab told AFP. "Whether she was singing or not is not our business." Warsame was one of only around 30 female MPs in parliament. The Shebab have intensified attacks during the ongoing Muslim holy month of Ramazan, and Musab said the Islamists would continue to "kill all the other MPs and government officials, whenever we get the opportunity."
Witnesses said the gunmen had trailed the lawmaker in car before attacking. "I saw the gunmen driving in a car following the MP, then they opened fire... she died instantly and the gunmen then escaped," said Abdukadir Ali, a witness. "The dead body of the lawmaker and her driver were left in a pool of blood." Warsame was famous for her songs in the 1970s, when she sang about political and social justice in opposition to the hardline rule of then dictator Siad Barre before he was toppled in 1991, an event that triggered the all-out civil war in Somalia that still drags on today. The singer spent several years in exile in the United States during Somalia's worst years of fighting.