(Bloomberg) -- Nine passengers died and eight were wounded when a bomb hit a mini-bus on the outskirts of capital Mogadishu this morning, police said.

The victims were traveling from the town of Afgoye to Mogadishu when a roadside bomb exploded, Yahye Ahmed, a police officer, said by phone. No one has claimed responsibility for the blast, though the police blamed al-Shabaab, an al-Qaeda-linked Islamist group.

The insurgents have been carrying out sporadic attacks in the Horn-of-Africa nation that has endured two decades of civil war.

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