A suicide bomber in a car rigged with explosives blew himself up near the home of Somali prime minister Ali Mohamed Gedi in the capital Mogadishu on Sunday, injuring several people, witnesses said
"A security officer stopped the vehicle and it detonated," said one witness who gave his name as Ismail. "I saw so many wounded people. I can't tell if anyone was killed." It was not immediately clear if Mr Gedi was at his home at the time.
Ismail was among a number of civilians who sought safety inside the prime minister's compound after the blast.
"The guards are not letting anyone out," he told Reuters by telephone. "An Islamic school was badly damaged in the explosion. No one knows what happened to the children inside."
Mr 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 remnants of a defeated Islamist movement who have vowed to wage an "Iraq-style" insurgency.
Six Islamist fighters, including foreigners from Western countries, were killed in US air strikes and battles with local forces in northern Somalia this weekend, a regional official said today.
"Yesterday we killed six terrorists from America, Britain, Sweden, Morocco, Pakistan and Yemen," said Mohamed Ali Yusuf, finance minister in the semi-autonomous Puntland administration.
"We came out victors and the fighting is over. Five Puntland troops were wounded," he told a news conference in Bossasso.
He gave no other details. Local forces on trucks fitted with heavy guns have blocked roads leading up to the mountain hideouts where American missiles crashed down on Friday. CNN said the attacks were targeting an al Qaeda suspect.
A Somali jihadist group calling itself the Young Mujahideen Movement had earlier said it suffered no casualties in what it called "random" US air strikes and said it had killed 11 soldiers.
"American planes carried out random attacks without causing any losses among the mujahideen, praise to God," the group said in a web posting. The statement could not be immediately verified but was on a site used by al Qaeda and other Islamists.
Speaking in Singapore, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates declined to comment on the strikes in rugged northern Somalia, saying it was possibly an operation still in progress.
CNN quoted unnamed sources as saying the attacks were the second in six months aimed at a suspect in the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed 240 people.