More than 300 people died after twin bomb explosions in Mogadishu, an official said on Monday, as locals packed hospitals in search of friends and relatives caught up in Somalia’s deadliest attack in a decade.

The death toll has steadily risen since Saturday, when the blasts – for which no organisation had claimed responsibility by Monday morning – struck at two busy junctions in the heart of the city. “We have confirmed 300 people died in the blast. The death toll will still higher because some people still missing,” Abdikadir Abdirahman, the director of the city’s ambulance service, told Reuters on Monday.

Aden Nur, a doctor at the city’s Madina hospital, said they had recorded 258 deaths while Ahmed Ali, a nurse at the nearby Osman Fiqi hospital, told Reuters five bodies had sent there. Nur said 160 of the bodies could not recognized. “(They) were buried by the government on Sunday. The others were buried by their relatives. Over a hundred injured also brought here,” he told Reuters at the hospital.Some of the injured evacuated by air to Turkey for treatment, officials said.

Locals visiting their injured relatives or collecting their bodies filled every available space in Madina hospital.

“My last time to speak with my brother was some minutes before the blast occurred. By then he told me, he wason the way to meet and passing at K5,” Halima Nur, a local mother, told Reuters, referring to one of the junctions that struck.

“I am afraid he wasamong the unrecognized charred bodies that buried yesterday. I have no hope of getting him alive or dead. But I cannot go home.”

DEADLIEST SINCE INSURGENCY BEGAN

Saturday bomb attacks were the deadliest since Islamist militant group al Shabaab began an insurgency in 2007.

Neither it nor any other group had claimed responsibility, but al Shabaab, which allied to al Qaeda, stages regular attacks in the capital and other parts of the country.

The group is waging an insurgency against Somalia’s U.N.-backed government and its African Union allies in a bid to impose its own strict interpretation of Islam.

The militants driven out of Mogadishu in 2011 and have  steadily losing territory since then to the combined forces of AU peacekeepers and Somali security forces. But Al Shabaab retains the capacity to mount large, complex bomb attacks. Over the past three years, the number of civilians killed by insurgent bombings has steadily climbed as al Shabaab increases the size of its bombs.

Some of those seriously injured in Saturday’s bombing moved by ambulance to the airport on Monday morning to flown to Turkey for further treatment, Nur added. Workers unloaded boxes of medicine and other medical supplies from a Turkish military plane parked on the tarmac, while Turkish medical teams attended to the cases of injuries moved from the hospital for evacuation.

Also read:Bomb blast: 276 killed in deadliest single attack in Somalia’s history