ADDIS ABABA — Ethiopia has warned of an increased threat from Somalia's Al-Qaeda-linked Shabab, saying the country should expect more attacks, the foreign ministry said Tuesday. The announcement comes after two Somali nationals were killed last month when a bomb they were making exploded in Addis Ababa. Officials said they planned to target crowds gathered for a World Cup qualifying match. “More activities of this nature are expected to happen in Ethiopia, and therefore the need for raising security levels is very, very important,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Dina Mufti told reporters. Ethiopian troops entered Somalia in November 2011 to support African Union and Somali forces to fight Shabab extremists. The militants have vowed to exact revenge on countries with soldiers in Somalia. In Kenya, which also invaded Somalia in 2011, Shabab gunmen massacred at least 67 people in their September attack on Nairobi's Westgate mall. Security in the Ethiopian capital has been visibly boosted in recent weeks, with armed police stationed outside international hotels and official venues, including the African Union. Ethiopia shares a long, porous border with war-torn Somalia. “It is very easy to infiltrate into our territory,” he said, saying the threat was “more from external terrorist elements than the internal home-grown ones.” There are over 215,000 Somali refugees in Ethiopia, mostly living in camps near the Somali border, according to the United Nations refugee agency. Ethiopia, whose troops in Somalia are based mainly in southern border zones, is considering joining the much larger AU force. Meanwhile, Somalia's Shabab insurgents said on Tuesday gunmen responsible for the Westgate mall massacre were special suicide commandos, rubbishing reports the men had tried to escape. Members of a “martyrdom brigade,” the gunmen were “brothers who have volunteered to enter into enemy ranks and cause havoc before being killed by the enemy,” the Al-Qaeda-linked Shabab said in the latest issue of their online magazine. While not specifically saying they had died, the Shabab dismissed initial reports by Kenya's army chief, Julius Karangi, that the men had attempted to flee. “Karangi even had the audacity to claim that the martyrdom-seeking mujahedeen were seeking to abscond and escape from the mall,” read the magazine. The magazine — a special edition released on Tuesday via extremist websites and dedicated to the four-day Westgate siege — was published a day after four men appeared in a Nairobi court charged with “supporting a terrorist group” over the attack. Slickly produced and written in both English and East Africa's Swahili language, the magazine is crammed with gruesome photographs of the attack, and gloating messages lauding the success of the massacre. “Westgate was not a fight, it was a message,” the magazine read, quoting Shabab spokesman Ali Mohamed Rage. “The real fight is on the way.” It did not name or say how many gunmen there were, but police believe there to have been only four attackers, and not the dozen that security forces had initially reported. — Agencies
