Suicide bomber kills 7 near Somali PM's home | Top News | Reuters

Suicide bomber kills 7 near Somali PM's home | Top News | Reuters

Suicide bomber kills 7 near Somali PM's home
Sun Jun 3, 2007 6:00PM BST

By Guled Mohamed

MOGADISHU (Reuters) - A suicide bomber killed seven people outside the Somali prime minister's home in Mogadishu on Sunday, just hours after an official said Western jihadists were among the dead from U.S. strikes in the north.

Security sources said Ali Mohamed Gedi was unhurt, but five soldiers and two civilians died when the bomber detonated a car rigged with explosives at the gates of his residence in a heavily guarded neighbourhood of the capital.

"I saw limbs nearly a kilometre from where the suicide bomber detonated," a police officer at the scene who asked not to be named told Reuters by telephone.

"We don't know how the suicide bomber managed to pass through undetected ... The wounded cannot be counted."

African Union peacekeepers raced to the area. "We took the prime minister to a safe place after the blast. He is well," said their spokesman, Captain Paddy Ankunda.

Gedi's interim administration is struggling to impose its authority on the anarchic Horn of Africa nation. Near daily attacks on government troops and their Ethiopian military allies are blamed on members of a defeated Islamist movement who have vowed to wage an "Iraq-style" insurgency.

On Friday, a U.S. warship fired missiles at one group of foreign fighters in the remote mountains of northern Somalia's semi-autonomous Puntland. CNN said the attacks were aimed at an al Qaeda suspect.

On Sunday, the region's finance minister said six Islamists -- from America, Britain, Sweden, Morocco, Pakistan and Yemen -- had been killed in the air strikes and in gun battles with local forces. He gave no other details.

AL QAEDA TARGETED

Speaking in Singapore, U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates declined to comment on the strikes in rugged northern Somalia, saying it was possibly an operation still in progress.

A Somali jihadist group calling itself the Young Mujahideen Movement said it suffered no casualties in what it called "random" U.S. air strikes and said it killed 11 soldiers. The Web posting could not immediately be verified but was on a site used by al Qaeda and other Islamists.

Sources told CNN the air strikes were the second in six months aimed at a suspect in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed 240 people.

The United States also launched air strikes in southern Somalia in January aimed at three top al Qaeda suspects but killed their allies instead, U.S. officials have said.

They were believed to be in a group of Islamists who fled Mogadishu in January after being routed by Somali interim government forces and the Ethiopian military.

Washington says six al Qaeda operatives or associates are in Somalia, including alleged embassy bomber Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, and Abu Talha al-Sudani, accused of orchestrating the 2002 bombing of an Israeli-owned hotel in Kenya that killed 15.

Others include Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, hardline leader of the ousted Somali Islamic Courts Council (SICC), and Adan Hashi Ayro, head of the SICC's feared military wing, the Shabaab.

(Additional reporting by Abdiqani Hassan in Bossasso)