Somali PM blames al Qaeda for suicide bombing

Somali Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi accused al Qaeda of being behind a suicide bombing that killed seven people outside his home in Mogadishu yesterday and said its militants had to be eliminated.

The bombing occurred just hours after an official said Western jihadists were among the dead from US missile strikes in northern Somalia.

Five soldiers and two civilians were killed when the bomber detonated a vehicle rigged with explosives at the gates of Mr Gedi's residence in a heavily guarded neighbourhood of the Somali capital.

"I saw limbs nearly a kilometre from where the suicide bomber detonated," a police officer at the scene, asking not to be named, said 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 and whisked the Prime Minister to safety.

"This was a terrorist act by al Qaeda that was meant to create fear," Mr Gedi told a radio station. "We have been patient for so long. We can no longer cohabit with these terrorists... We have to eliminate them."

His 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 US warship fired missiles at a group of foreign fighters in the remote mountains of northern Somalia's semi-autonomous Puntland. CNN said the target was an al Qaeda suspect.

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

In Singapore, US Defence Secretary Robert Gates declined to comment on the strikes, saying it was possibly an operation still in progress.