Mogadishu, Somalia - The Islamic militiamen controlling the Somali capital broke up a wedding celebration because a band was playing and women and men were socializing together, witnesses said Saturday, describing the latest crackdown by a group feared to be installing Taliban-style rule in this African nation.
The Islamic fighters beat band members with electric cables and confiscated their equipment, said Asha Ilmi Hashi, a singer with the group Mogadishu Stars.
"We had warned the family not to include in their ceremony what is not allowed by the sharia law. This includes the mixing of men and women and playing music," Sheik Iise Salad, who heads an Islamic court in the northeastern Huriwaa District, told The Associated Press. "That is why we raided and took their equipment."
"What was going there was un-Islamic," Salad said.
The late Friday attack came three days after militiamen in central Somalia shot and killed two people at the screening of a World Cup soccer broadcast banned because it violated the fighters' strict interpretation of Islamic law.
Washington has said some leaders and members of the militia that seized control of the capital and much of the south last month have links to al-Qaida and are sheltering terror network members responsible for the 1998 attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Osama bin Laden said in a recorded message last month that Somalia was a battleground in his war on the United States.
A recruiting video issued by militia members and obtained by The Associated Press this week shows Arab radicals fighting alongside the local extremists in Mogadishu, provided the first hard evidence that non-Somalis have joined with Islamic extremists in Somalia. The group has repeatedly denied links to extremists such as al-Qaida.
The militia has filled a power vacuum in this anarchic country without effective central government, setting up a court system and a militia to enforce their vision of Islamic rule.
The group has appeared to grow increasingly radical, forbidding movies, television and now music.
In the World Cup crackdown, the Islamic fighters were dispersing a crowd of teenagers watching the match. They opened fire after the teenagers defied their orders to leave the hall in which a businessman was screening the Germany-Italy match on satellite television. The dead were a girl and the business owner.
The Islamic group said it has arrested two of its fighters who shot and killed the victims.