MOGADISHU, 4 June 2007 — A suicide bomber in a car killed seven people near the home of Somali Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi in the capital Mogadishu yesterday, but he was unhurt, security sources and witnesses said.

“I saw limbs nearly a kilometer from where the suicide bomber detonated,” a police officer at the scene told Reuters by telephone.

“Prime Minister Gedi was unhurt. The vehicle exploded outside the gate of his house,” he said. “We don’t know how the suicide bomber managed to pass through undetected ...The wounded cannot be counted.” A security source close to the prime minister said seven people were killed, including five soldiers guarding the residence. The blast flattened other buildings in the area.

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. Another witness at the scene said an Islamic school was among the buildings damaged in the explosion. “No one knows what happened to the children inside,” he said.

Meanwhile, at least 12 Islamist fighters, including foreigners, were killed in US naval shelling and fighting with regional forces in Somalia’s semi-autonomous region of Puntland, officials said yesterday. The Puntland government said its forces crushed the fighters in the hilly areas around the town of Bargal, about 1,250 kilometers (780 miles) northeast of the Somali capital Mogadishu, before a US Navy warship shelled the area.

“Their bodies are lying in the mountainous area and we hope to show them to the media. They (Islamists) have lost in the battle and we killed 12 of them,” said a Puntland military commander who requested anonymity. “We surrounded the whole area and we expected that none of them would flee,” the commander added by satellite phone from the corpse-strewn scene of the clashes.

Puntland Finance Minister Mohamed Ali Yusuf meanwhile told reporters in the northern Somali town of Bosasso: “Our forces defeated the Islamist fighters consisting of Somali and foreign fighters, most of them are dead now and some of them have fled the area. Our forces are fully controlling Bargal.” Citing documents recovered, Yusuf said the “terrorists (were) from America, Britain, Sweden, Morocco, Pakistan and Yemen.”