Mogadishu Airport Explosion Video: Fact-Checked & PARTLY FALSE

This post on X (formerly Twitter) with a video claiming to show a roadside explosion at the Mogadishu airport exit as the capital prepared to welcome China’s foreign minister is PARTLY FALSE. The clip, shared on 9 January 2026, shows an explosion occurring on a road where people and security forces are standing. Voices speaking Somali can be heard in the background. Chinese and Somali flags, along with an image of Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, appear at the bottom of the video. A text overlay on the clip reads: “BREAKING NEWS: Roadside bomb explosion.” The text accompanying the video claims: “Somalia imposed a 48-hour curfew and barricaded Mogadishu for China’s Foreign Minister, yet a roadside bomb still detonated on the airport exit road while his plane was overhead. Visit scrapped. No statement. Just another humiliating failure they can’t bear the world seeing.” While the post claims that a 48-hour curfew was imposed in Mogadishu, the details are inaccurate. Contrary to the claim, the curfew began at 4:00 a.m. and lasted until 1:00 p.m. local time, as seen in this report. The Somali government imposed heavy security restrictions in Mogadishu to welcome Yi, who was expected to arrive in the city on 9 January 2026. Large parts of the capital were sealed off under tight security measures imposed earlier in the day. However, the Chinese and Somali governments later postponed the visit, which would have been the first by the Asian country’s foreign minister since the 1980s. Does the video show an explosion on the airport exit road? A Google reverse image search of a screenshot from the video established that the explosion occurred during an Al Shabaab attack on Mogadishu’s Dayah Hotel in January 2017. At the time, media outlets reported that “a bomb explosion was caught on camera in Mogadishu.” PesaCheck has reviewed an X post with a video claiming to show a roadside explosion at the Mogadishu airport exit as the capital prepared to welcome China’s foreign minister and found it to be PARTLY FALSE. This post is part of an ongoing series of PesaCheck fact-checks examining content marked as potential misinformation on Facebook and other social media platforms. By partnering with Facebook and similar social media platforms, third-party fact-checking organisations like PesaCheck are helping to sort fact from fiction. We do this by giving the public deeper insight and context to posts they see in their social media feeds. Have you spotted what you think is fake or false information on Facebook? Here’s how you can report. And, here's more information on PesaCheck's methodology for fact-checking questionable content. This fact-check was written by PesaCheck Fact-Checker Hassan Istiila and edited by PesaCheck senior copy editor Mary Mutisya and chief copy editor Stephen Ndegwa. The article was approved for publication by PesaCheck managing editor Doreen Wainainah. PesaCheck is East Africa’s first public finance fact-checking initiative. It was co-founded by Catherine Gicheru and Justin Arenstein, and is being incubated by the continent’s largest civic technology and data journalism accelerator: Code for Africa. It seeks to help the public separate fact from fiction in public pronouncements about the numbers that shape our world, with a special emphasis on pronouncements about public finances that shape government’s delivery of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) public services, such as healthcare, rural development and access to water/ sanitation. PesaCheck also tests the accuracy of media reportage. To find out more about the project, visit pesacheck.org.