Somalia's Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi ... narrowly escaped an assassination bid yesterday which killed seven persons. - Reuters

MOGADISHU (Reuters):

Somali Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi accused al-Qaida 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 United States 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 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-Qaida that was meant to create fear," 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."

Daily attacks

His interim administration is struggling to impose its authorityon 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 a group of foreign fighters in the remote mountains of northern Somalia's semi-autonomous Puntland. CNN said the target was an al-Qaida suspect.

The region's Finance Minister said yesterday 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, U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates declined to comment on the strikes, 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 the random U.S. strikes and had killed 11 soldiers.

The web posting could not be immediately verified but was on a site used by al-Qaida and other Islamists.