Soldiers stage mutiny in Somalia’s Puntland state

MOGADISHU, Somalia

Soldiers in Somalia’s northeastern semiautonomous state of Puntland on Tuesday staged a mutiny over unpaid salaries, an official said.

Abdinour Abdi Ahmed, a security official in Puntland's Bari region, told Anadolu over the phone that soldiers seized a security checkpoint in Garowe, the state's administrative capital, in the early hours on Tuesday.

"The situation is under control right now," Ahmed said, adding that "but there has been a mutiny staged by some soldiers who claim they haven't received their salaries."

However, the soldiers who staged the mutiny acted professionally, and they did not harm anyone while closing a key highway connecting Garowe and Bosaso city in the state.

Located on the southern coast of the Gulf of Aden, Bosaso is also a commercial port city of the semiautonomous state, 1,414 kilometers (878 miles) northeast of the capital Mogadishu.

The mutiny occurred on the same day that the region's President Said Abdullahi Deni was holding a campaign rally in Galkayo town ahead of the disputed local council elections.

The planned local elections in Puntland sparked controversy in the state, and Dani’s critics described the election as divisive.

Addressing his Kaah party supporters in Galkayo on Tuesday, Deni accused Somalia’s President Hassan Sheikh Mahamud of opposing Puntland’s democratization.

This comes hours after Somalia’s Prime Minister Hamza Abdi Barre criticized Puntland’s leaders for the strained relations with the federal government, accusing him of undermining development projects in the state.

Relations between the federal government in Mogadishu and the northern state have soured since Puntland announced it would govern itself as an independent government.