Runway Slaying Halts Relief Flights to Somalia : Africa: Murdered security guard worked for Los Angeles aid group. It reacts angrily when Red Cross resumes using airport.

A shooting death on the airport tarmac forced a temporary suspension of relief flights to this capital over the weekend and heightened tensions between rival clans battling for control of the starving country.

The killing Saturday of a security guard vividly illustrated the anarchy in Somalia, an East African nation in the grips of clan-based warfare and famine. Aid groups estimate that 2,000 people are dying daily and that 2 million lives are threatened.

Saturday’s violence also sparked a war of words between aid groups on whether to continue using Mogadishu’s oceanfront airport or to avoid it until security improves.

Although aid groups to Somalia never travel without armed escorts, food is routinely looted from warehouses, truck convoys, the port and the airport.

The Los Angeles-based International Medical Corps, which had hired the victim, said it would boycott the airport until security improved. The group was angered when others suspended flights but then resumed operations.

The airport handles 10 relief flights daily, most from Nairobi, Kenya. A Red Cross flight landed at dawn on Sunday.

Saturday’s trouble began when a Somali security guard, manning a machine gun atop a Toyota Land Cruiser, was fatally shot in the back as his vehicle greeted a plane bringing medical supplies from Nairobi.

Both the plane and the Land Cruiser were being used by the International Medical Corps, which is sending doctors, nurses and medicine to Somalia.

The Hawadle sub-clan, the faction that controls the airport, normally asks security guards accompanying aid vehicles to get off and wait outside the airport entrance.

The guard working for the medical corps refused demands that he get down from his perch outside the airport, according to several witnesses, and the Land Cruiser drove out to meet the plane.

An airport gunman calmly walked up behind the vehicle and fired four rounds.

The medical corps plane left immediately after the fatal shooting, and other aid flights Saturday were canceled or diverted to a remote airstrip 31 miles southwest of the capital.

Rick Carbone, an official of the International Medical Corps, noted that his group and others observed a Red Cross boycott in June and July after a Red Cross plane was looted on the tarmac.

“We all went in lock-step to make our point,” said the angry Carbone. “Now someone is killed and they are talking convenience.”

But Red Cross spokesman Horst Hamborg said: “We depend on the airport. Our officials have been there, and they gave us the green light to use it.”

Somalia has had no central authority since rebels toppled dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in January, 1991.

Like the rest of the nation, Mogadishu is largely controlled by forces loyal to two main warlords, but it is also divided into smaller fiefdoms by armed clans and sub-clans who regularly clash.

The United Nations last month approved plans to send 3,500 troops to Somalia to protect food deliveries, but the first contingent of 500 Pakistanis is not expected for at least another week.