Somaliland serving officers, Major Abdullahi Ahmed Tallan and Second Lieutenant Nur Aw Ali Nuh, died yesterday after the car they were driving overturned allowing a group of armed men who were chasing them to catch up with them and kill them.
The incident followed the arrest and transfer of a man called Ali Eid who later died in jail in Erigavo. Ali, reports state, had an altercation with Lieutenant Nur, claiming that the officer owed him a substantial amount of money. Lieutenant Nur, in turn, accused the deceased of trading in liquor and that he was using his house as a distribution point.
Searching Ali’s house, nothing to prove the officer’s point was discovered. Ali vowed that he will get what was owed him one way or another.
Obviously fearing for their security, the officers ordered the arrest of Ali In Garadag, where the argument happened, and immediately transferred him to the regional capital of Sanaag, Erigavo, some one hundred and fifty kilometers to the north.
Ali died shortly after arrival and other inmates leaked out that he was poisoned, which started a furor at Garadag, the birthplace of the deceased, where an angry mob called for immediate justice.
Other reports put the cause of death to ‘aggravated’ hypertension – a conclusion government reports also favor. The deceased could not live with the circumstances and ‘mistreatment’ which shrouded his arrest, is one conclusion many preferred.
The two officers sneaked out of town which incident started a major manhunt in the area ending, two days later, Monday, in the lamentable demise of the officers in an area between Garadag and Oog.Major Tallan was the commanding officer of the district’s custodial corps. Lieutenant Nur was the second-in-command of the police presence.
For reasons not defined yet neither did the officers take armed bodyguards from their commands nor did they call for reinforcements from other forces in the area during the four days they were in hiding at, as reports reveal, the residence of one of the traditional leaders in the El Afwein area.
Following the death of the officers, who both came from Awdal region, and from the same sub-clan, Sultan Abdirahman Dhawal, the supreme leader of their family, vowed that they will not be buried until their assassins were apprehended and sentenced to death.
Other Sultans in the Sanaag region, however, interceded cautioning calm and advising that the dead be buried while the hunt for the culprits was on.
One of the Sultans, Abdullahi Ali Koor, among a bevy of other traditional leaders driving to Oog were the dead were taken, however, himself died when the car he was traveling in overturned, today, Tuesday, near their destination.
President Bihi called on all chief commanders of the country’s security forces to pool resources and round up the killers who were said to be driving three 4-wheel cars and hiding somewhere in the many valleys of the nearby Gollis range mountains.
The situation is still developing and tense. One convlusion that is surfacing is that the government grossly misread the situation from beginning to end.
The officers’ death brings the total of homicide cases in the area within the week to four.
