Gunmen slay Somali official

Tue 3 Jul 2007, 8:39 GMT

By Guled Mohamed

MOGADISHU (Reuters) - Somali gunmen shot dead a senior government official in a troubled Mogadishu district and a teenager died when munitions left behind by African Union peacekeepers exploded, officials said on Tuesday.

The seaside capital has witnessed an upsurge in attacks by insurgents targeting interim government officials.

The government blames the string of suicide bombings, roadside blasts and assassinations on the remnants of an Islamist movement ousted by the government and its Ethiopian allies over the New Year.

Two men armed with pistols assassinated Osman Ali, the deputy district commissioner in the Islamist stronghold of Horuwa in north Mogadishu, late on Monday. A district commissioner was also murdered by gunmen last month.

"Two gunmen shot dead the Horuwa deputy commissioner," Mohamed Omar, deputy police chief for the district, told Reuters. "The men shot him and ran away."

Elsewhere, a Somali teenager died from wounds he sustained on Monday after he and another boy played with unexploded ordnance left behind by A.U. peacekeepers in southern Mogadishu, a doctor said.

Residents said two boys had died from the blast and two others were wounded. A spokesman for the peacekeepers could not be immediately reached for comment.

"Unfortunately one boy died this morning from his wounds. The other boy is stable. They were brought late yesterday with severe wounds. I don't know if two died at the scene," Ambrose Oiko, head of the A.U. field hospital, told Reuters.

In the past few weeks the peacekeepers from Uganda have been detonating tonnes of weapons seized in Mogadishu by Somali and Ethiopian troops. Mogadishu is one of the world's most heavily armed cities.

The 1,600 Ugandan troops are the vanguard of 8,000 strong AU peacekeepers expected to be deployed to the war-ravaged Horn of African country to help secure peace and protect President Abdullahi Yusuf's interim government.

Somalia plunged into anarchy in 1991 after clan militias deposed former dictator Mohamed Siad Barre. Since then, thousands have died from the conflict and famine.

Reuters