Fighters from Somali militant group al Shabaab rammed a suicide car bomb into the gates of an African Union base in Somalia and fought their way inside early today, the group and the Somali army said.

There were no immediate reports about casualties from the attack in Ceel Cado, in the south of the country, about 550 km west of Mogadishu, near the Kenyan border.

Al Shabaab, a group aligned to Al Qaeda, said the base had Kenyan soldiers serving as part of an African Union (Amisom) force battling the Islamist group in Somalia, a country mired in conflict since civil war broke out in 1991.

“Our fighters went in and after heavy exchange of gunfire we took over the base,” Sheikh Abdiasis Abu Musab, al Shabaab’s military operations spokesman, told Reuters.

Musab added that AU soldiers fled from the base.

But a Somali military official said the fighting in the base continued. Residents said they could hear sporadic gunfire.

“A suicide car bomb exploded at the gate of the base and their fighters went in. There is heavy gunfire going on inside the base,” Major Hussein Abdulle, a military officer stationed about 100 km from the Ceel Cado base said.

Al Shabaab has in the past year staged multiple attacks against African Union bases in Somalia, and in September 2015 they attacked a Ugandan base in Janale, fifty kilometres from the capital Mogadishu and killed 12 soldiers.

The attacks are part of a guerrilla-warfare strategy to drive out foreign troops and impose the renegade group’s harsh version of Islamic law across the Horn of African nation.

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Vice President Emmerson Mnangagwa has claimed that suspects drilled a ceiling panel to gain entry into his office, making the burglary the fourth to have happened in the same office.

Justice, legal and parliamentary affairs permanent secretary Virgina Mabhiza told the state media that the break-in was discovered by Mnangagwa on Wednesday around 7am.

Officials from the Radiation Protection Authority of Zimbabwe were said to be busy doing their investigations at the office.

However Mabhiza said there was no clue yet if anything was stolen and whether the intention of the break-in was to “insert” anything. She however said there were “visible holes” on the ceiling.

Information minister Christopher Mushowe said the pattern will suggest that the people who did the break-in were familiar with the “nature of the panels” at VP’s office.

Mushowe said government was “concerned” and was not going “to allow this to continue to happen”. In one of the ‘break-ins’ in 2014, cyanide was sprinkled inside Mnangagwa’s office.

Last year, his Mercedes car was hit by another vehicle in Harare.

Mnangagwa took over as acting president from Phelekezela MphokoMonday. He is seen as one of Mugabe’s trusted men with a chance of taking over. He is, however, facing resistance from the so-called G40 which is said to prefer Grace Mugabe as her husband’s successor. The G40 group is said to include local government minister, Savior Kasukuwere, information minister Jonathan Moyo and Mugabe’s nephew, Patrick Zhuwao.

Mnangagwa was the minister of state security in the 1980s when government targeted civilians under the pretext of “hunting down the dissidents” in Matabeleland and the midlands.

However, recently released documents from South Africa have shown that he routinely exaggerated the extent of the dissidence problem. On one occassion he paraded boys before the national TV whom he claimed were sent by apartheid South Africa to destabilise Zimbabwe.

Evidence has also emerged from declassified documents that he had a working relationship with apartheid Pretoria.

In 2010, Mnangagwa was named by Genocide Watch as one of the chief culprits in the 1980s killings.

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Smith and Ouzman, the company that printed ballot materials for the 2013 elections in Kenya has been ordered to pay a fine of £2.2 million for bribing Kenyan officials to win the contract.

This is the second time Smith and Ouzman has faced the wrath of an uncompromising UK judicial system, the first being the jailing of the company’s directors in February last year.

Christopher John Smith and Nicholas Charles Smith were sent to jail after investigations by the Serious Fraud Office revealed they had a hand in the bribe scandal involving £395.074, given to officials in Kenya and Mauritania.

The two Smiths and their two co-accused Timothy Hamilton Forrester and Abdirahman Mohamed Omar first appeared for trial in the UK in August 2013.

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The National Congress Party (NCP) of Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir is one of about twenty political parties that registered on Monday in Juba, South Sudan.

According to South Sudan’s Political Parties Act, 2012, all parties should be registered in the independent South Sudan to be recognized in any future elections and the Political Parties Council (PPC) set tomorrow, January 15, 2016 as the deadline to register all parties in the country.

There are more than twenty political parties in South Sudan; most of them have offices only in the capital Juba including the ruling SPLM, which had never registered in South Sudan since independence in 2011 and had only been using the registration certificate from Khartoum before the country split.

Meanwhile, South Sudanese President, Salva Kiir, has appealed to his supporters to mobilize votes for him in future elections due to be conducted in 2018.

Speaking briefly to cheering supporters as the ruling party of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) handed its basic documents to the Political Parties Council (PPC) for registration, Kiir said there is no easy struggle in everything.

“When time comes for elections, you mobilize more people to come and increase your numbers and give all the votes to my box,” said Kiir, speaking to ululating SPLM supporters at Freedom Square in Juba.

The president was driven on an open hardtop car as several ministers, members of parliament from SPLM and ordinary citizens accompanied him to the PPC office in Thongpiny suburb of Juba.

“You have been in the sun for long time and that is why I stopped here to say thank you very much for the support accorded to us (SPLM),” he said, adding: “I want to tell you that there is no easy struggle. See how you walked on feet to the SPLM office and return here. That is a struggle.”

South Sudan is the world’s newest country, and broke away from the Sudan in 2011 after decades of war pitting the mainly Arab Muslim north against their countrymen in the Christian animist south.

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