Somalia Food Burned (AP Photo/Mohamed Olad Hassan)

Somali militant group of Al-Shabab on Friday seized and burnt food aid donated to the people of Somalia by the USAID aid group.

The Associated Press quoted Sheik Ali Mohamed Hussein an Al-Shabab member as saying that the food was expired but the World Food Programme countered those remarks by saying that they don’t distribute expired  food.

“We have burned the expired food in public and we will continue the operation to check what is left in the markets to take care of the health of our people,” Hussein said.

“WFP brought the dirty food to poison our people. Many would have died because of the expired food so we have traced and raided from the markets and decided to burn,” Hussein said.

The World Food Programme spokesperson Mr. Peter Smerdon, said he was checking on reports of the food burning and couldn’t immediately comment.

The AP also quoted Mr. Matt Goshko, spokesman for the Somali team at the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya as saying “the burning of food aid shows Al-Shabab’s callous disregard for the plight of the Somali people.”

Earlier this week militants confiscated several thousand sacks of food from traders in central Somalia after the militants alleged that the food sacks were from WFP.

Ali Jamal, a businessman. Was quoted as saying “They marked about 30 stores, including mine, in which the food was kept and ordered us not to open. They started loading some of the contents in the stores with trucks saying they will distribute it to the needy,”

In November 2009, the militant group of Al-Shabab imposed 11 conditions on the United Nations Agencies and Non-government organization operating in Somalia indicating that they don’t interfere with the religion of Islam and pay a total cost of $20,000 USD every six months.

The WFP announced in January that it was suspending its operations in Somalia citing months of attacks  and extortion from militant groups.

WFP says it targets about 2.5 million people for food assistance across Somalia, although 625,000 of those people are in areas where operations are currently suspended. In 2009, WFP reached 3.3 million people in Somalia with food supplies.

News Report by Abdulaziz Billow
Abdulaziz Billow is AfrobeatRadio’s correspondent for East Africa.