By Mohamed Ali Bile
Mogadishu - Somali militiamen on Wednesday began building a mosque over an Italian colonial-era cemetery where they prompted outrage by unearthing hundreds of skeletons last week.
The militia, allied with Mogadishu's Islamic courts, brought in construction workers and building materials, and encouraged area residents to come to the site to pray, residents said.
"We are not ready to pray at the location of dead bodies that human beings are harming," resident Abdinasir Hussien said.
The militia dug up hundreds of corpses last week and threw them into a dump near a Mogadishu airport, drawing a strongly worded protest from the Italian government and from residents of the Somali capital.
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The interim Somali government on Saturday condemned the desecrations and said it would bring the militiamen to justice.
But the government has not yet left the safety of Nairobi, where it was formed, nor shown that it can exert control in the volatile capital - seen as a key test of its legitimacy.
The motive of the mass exhumations - and who ordered them - remained unclear on Wednesday.
The militia said their orders came from the Islamic courts, which have imposed Islamic sharia law on parts of northern Mogadishu.
"We are the forces of the Islamic courts umbrella operating in Mogadishu, and we are implementing what our authority ordered," militia chief Omar Ghelle told reporters on Tuesday.
But a number of clerics aligned with the courts have decried the desecrations and disavowed involvement, saying it is out of keeping with their faith.
Some analysts have speculated that the exhumations were a mesage of opposition to the new government, which has warm relations with Rome and is disliked by the Muslim militants who control the courts.
Most of those disinterred were former Italian colonial officials and soldiers.
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