Canadian fatally shot in Somalia was among expats returning amid wave of activism

Almaas Elman, who was to be laid to rest Friday after being killed this week in the country’s capital of Mogadishu, is the second Somali-Canadian who lost her life this year in pursuit of efforts to rebuild a country wracked by war.

Preliminary investigations show she was killed by a stray bullet this week in Mogadishu, the peacekeeping mission in Somalia said Friday, while some family members at her funeral shouted, “We want justice.

The statement by the African Union mission said Elman was hit while travelling in a car Wednesday inside a heavily defended base near the international airport where many diplomats and aid workers have offices in the Horn of Africa nation.

The AU statement said there was no record of a weapon being fired inside the base at the time Almaas Elman was shot and other stray bullets had been reported previously. It called her death “heart-wrenching and unfortunate.”

In July, Hodan Nalayeh, a Somali-Canadian journalist who once lived just outside Toronto, was among 27 people killed in a suicide bombing in the country’s southern port city of Kismayo.

Both had moved to Canada as children, part of a wave of more than 55,000 Somali refugees who arrived in the 1980s and 1990s, fleeing the civil war that engulfed the country at the time, and then its brutal aftermath.

But they were also part of another wave — the returnees.

Since a tenuous peace took hold in Somalia beginning in the mid-2000s, some who fled the war are going back to try to help efforts to sustain it.

Thousands are going back from refugee camps in surrounding regions. Others, like Elman and Nalayeh, are leaving the safety of countries like Canada

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