Somali militants execute “spies” in public
Following a US helicopter attack which killed a top al-Qaeda operative and the deadly double bombing of the AU peacekeeping HQ in Somali’s capital Mogadishu, Islamist militants there executed two people they said were spies for the AU and CIA. The BBC reports that hundreds of people watched as a firing squad from the al-Shabab group shot the men. In a sinister ratcheting up of terror and the enforcing of rigid Islamic law, al-Shabab, is said to have carried out amputations and lashings in the past, but this is the first public execution. The US regards al-Shabab as a proxy for al-Qaeda.
