Salaad Gabeyre Kediye

Who was he?

Salaad Gabeyre Kediye was born in 1933 in Harardhere, in present-day Mudug, trained at the Frunze military academy in Moscow and served in the army from 1956 (Wikipedia, Salaad Gabeyre Kediye). He received the Medal of Valour in 1964 and was the son-in-law of President Aden Abdulle Osman (same source).

The 1969 takeover

On 15 October 1969 President Abdirashid Ali Shermarke was killed by a bodyguard. On 21 October army units seized key points in Mogadishu and detained the government; the police co-operated (Library of Congress, Somalia: A Country Study). Wikipedia records that Kediye was among the officers who led the takeover, was known as "the father of the revolution", and served on the Supreme Revolutionary Council, which Major General Siad Barre soon headed. He became defence minister in 1970 (Wikipedia). The wider story is told in Siad Barre era, 1969–1991.

Arrest, trial and execution

Writing in 1972, the anthropologist I. M. Lewis recorded that General Mohamed Ainanshe, a vice-president, and General Salad Gavaire (Salaad Gabeyre) were arrested in May 1971 and charged with a plot "to kill the revolution". They were tried and publicly executed on 3 July 1972 (I. M. Lewis, "The politics of the 1969 Somali coup", Journal of Modern African Studies 10:3, 1972). Wikipedia records that Colonel Abdulkadir Dheel was executed with them (Wikipedia, Abdulkadir Dheel).

Lewis noted that the government itself arranged the funerals, a duty that by custom fell to the dead men's kin (Lewis, 1972).

Sources differ

• Rank. Sources give lieutenant colonel, brigadier general or general.
• Date of death. 3 July 1972 in most sources; one later source gives October 1972.

Read the primary sources yourself

• I. M. Lewis, "The politics of the 1969 Somali coup", Journal of Modern African Studies 10:3 (1972): Cambridge.
• Library of Congress, Somalia: A Country Study (1993), Coup d'état: text.