Sunday, August 12, 2007
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Ali Iman Sharmarke |
The victims were Somali-Canadian journalist Ali Iman Sharmarke, owner of the HornAfrik Media Company, and Mahad Ahmed Elmi, who hosts a popular radio talk show for the company. HornAfrik's broadcasts have criticized both the government and the Islamic militants who have been trying to topple the administration through a bloody insurgency.
"Those who don't want peace for Somalia are behind these attacks," deputy police commissioner Abdullahi Hassan Barise said. He said the men were targeted because of their jobs at the independent radio station.
Elmi, 30, was shot as he headed to work early yesterday, according to witnesses. Sharmarke, 50, was killed by a remote-controlled land mine as he drove home from Elmi's burial, authorities said.
Two other journalists -- one working for Reuters, the other for Voice of America -- were in the car with Sharmarke and were slightly injured, said Mohamed Ibrahim, a reporter in Mogadishu.
Just hours before the land mine explosion that killed Sharmarke, the media owner lamented Elmi's death.
SILENCED A VOICE
"The killing was meant to prevent a real voice that described the suffering in Mogadishu to other Somalis and to the world," Sharmarke told The Associated Press. "Elmi was a symbol of neutrality."
Elmi was married and had a son and a daughter.
Sharmarke had two wives and three children, according to Ugas Ali Mohamed Ali, a Somali elder. Although he spent many years outside Somalia, Sharmarke came to Mogadishu in 1999 to establish HornAfrik, Ali said.
Sharmarke, who had a comfortable career in Ottawa, had fled the brutal civil war in Somalia to Canada where he became a citizen.
He returned to Somalia in 1999 and founded HornAfrik, which won the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression's 2002 International Press Freedom Award.
Source: AP AND CP, Aug 12, 2007