The death toll from a devastating 30-hour siege by Al-Shabaab terrorists at a hotel in Somalia's capital Mogadishu has climbed to 21, the country’s Health Minister Ali Haji Adan said Sunday, according to the AFP news agency.
The gun and bomb attack by the Al-Qaeda-linked group on the popular Hayat hotel caused parts of the building to collapse, with many people feared trapped inside since the assault began on Friday evening.
"The ministry of health has so far confirmed the deaths of 21 people and 117 people wounded," 15 of them seriously, Adan said.
Emergency workers and bomb disposal experts made their way through the heavily damaged hotel on Sunday, looking for any explosives and removing rubble as security forces patrolled the area, reported AFP.
Police commissioner Abdi Hassan Mohamed Hijar told reporters on Sunday that "106 people including children and women" had been rescued during the siege, which ended around midnight.
The attack was the biggest in Mogadishu since Somalia's new President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud took office in June, and underscored the challenge of trying to crush the 15-year insurrection by the Islamist group.
The hotel was a favored meeting spot for government officials and scores of people were inside when a suicide bomber triggered a massive blast, forcing his way onto the premises along with heavily-armed gunmen.
Minutes later, a second explosion struck as rescuers, security forces and civilians rushed to help the injured, eyewitnesses said.
Al-Shabaab jihadists were driven out of Mogadishu in 2011, but still control swathes of countryside and retain the ability to launch deadly strikes, often targeting hotels and restaurants.
The deadliest attack occurred in October 2017 when a truck packed with explosives blew up in Mogadishu, killing 512 people.
The leader of Al-Shabaab, Ahmed Godane, was killed in a US air strike in 2014.
Since taking charge of Al-Shabaab in 2008, Godane had restyled the group as a global player in the Al-Qaeda network, carrying out bombings and suicide attacks in Somalia and elsewhere in the region, including the September 21, 2013, attack on the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya, that killed 67 people.