Dozens killed in Al-Shabaab car bomb attack in Somalia's Mogadishu

"The bodies of 17 people killed in the blast were taken to the hospital mortuary while 28 others were admitted for various wounds," said Mohamed Yusuf, the director of Medina Hospital, the main trauma facility in the Somali capital.

The explosion near a checkpoint outside the Afrik Hotel reverberated throughout the city, and sent a massive plume of black smoke into the air.

"The area was relatively dense with bystanders and some were killed and wounded in the blast, but we don’t have the exact number of casualties,” Abdullahi Ahmed, a security officer who witnessed the blast, said.

Other witnesses describing being knocked to the ground by the force of the blast, which damaged nearby buildings.

"I was not very far away from where the blast occurred, and I could see several people lying (on the ground), some of them dead with a pool of blood," said one, Abdikarim Mohamed.

"The blast was huge. It did damage to several nearby buildings."

Suado Ali was walking out of a travel agency when the shockwave knocked her flat.

"I was forced to the ground by the shockwave. I saw nearly ten people lying on the ground, some motionless and others screaming for help", he told AFP.

The attack comes just over a week after 26 people were killed and 56 injured in a 12-hour attack by Al-Shabaab jihadists on a popular hotel in the southern Somali port city of Kismayo.

A suicide bomber rammed a vehicle loaded with explosives into the Medina hotel on Friday before several heavily armed gunmen forced their way inside, shooting as they went.

A prominent Canadian-Somali journalist and YouTuber was among those killed in the suicide bomb and gun attack claimed by Al-Shabaab militants.

Hodan Naleyeh, who moved to Somalia from Canada in an attempt to “change the narrative” of her home country across the media, was killed in the attack that also claimed the lives of a number of foreigners at the Medina hotel in the port town of Kismayo.

Her husband and a local journalist were also killed and sources said most of those staying in the hotel were politicians and traders ahead of upcoming regional elections.

The Somali journalists' union SJS confirmed the reporters' deaths. "It is a very sad day for Somalia journalists," the union's secretary-general Ahmed Mumin said in a statement. 

That attack was the latest in a long line of bombing and assaults claimed by Shabaab, which has fought for more than a decade to topple the Somali government.

The militant group emerged from Islamic Courts that once controlled central and southern Somalia and are variously estimated to number between 5,000 and 9,000 men.

In 2010, the Shabaab declared their allegiance to Al-Qaeda.

In 2011, they fled positions they once held in Mogadishu, and have since lost many strongholds.

But they retain control of large rural swathes of the country and continue to wage a guerrilla war against the authorities.

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