2,000 Arrested, 450 Reported Slain in Week of Disturbances in Somalia

A human rights group said Friday that security forces in Somalia arrested about 2,000 people after religious disturbances last week and killed more than 300, bringing the week’s death toll to 450, including 46 people taken to a beach and shot.

New York-based Africa Watch, in a report based on interviews with residents of the Somali capital of Mogadishu, said 90 civilians and 20 soldiers died in fighting outside the city’s mosques a week earlier.

Random firing of automatic weapons from armored personnel carriers into crowded residential buildings, combined with arrests and executions in following days, brought the estimated toll to 450. More than 1,000 people were wounded, the independent rights group said in the report written in London and made public in Nairobi.

The army mounted house-to-house searches two days after the religious disturbances, whose cause remains obscure, the report said. Most of those arrested that night were taken to prisons and detention camps, but 46 were taken to the Jezira beach south of the capital and executed, it said.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the reports of summary executions are “credible.”

“We have raised our concerns with the government of Somalia,” Boucher said.