Six dead in attempt to kill Somali president

BAIDOA, Somalia, Sep 18 (Reuters) Six people were killed and several others wounded when a car exploded outside Somalia's parliament in Baidoa today in an assassination attempt on President Abdullahi Yusuf.

''It was an assassination attempt on the president,'' Foreign Minister Ismail Hurre told Reuters. ''A car exploded when the president's convoy was passing on the way to his residence.'' Government spokesman Abdirahman Dinari said: ''We hear six people were killed -- three bodyguards, three civilians. Parliamentarians and officials are safe.'' Police were hunting for those responsible, Dinari said.

The attack is sure to heighten tensions in the Horn of Africa country where the interim government's limited authority has been challenged by the rise of Islamists who seized Mogadishu in June and now control a swathe of southern Somalia.

A Reuters reporter at the scene saw black smoke billowing from burning cars close to the parliament building, which he said appeared to have dead bodies in them.

Government militiamen cordoned off the area around the parliament building, which is a converted grain warehouse.

The Somali ambassador to China, Mohamed Awil, told Reuters in Beijing an explosion erupted and gun fire broke out as Yusuf travelled to his official residence.

The attack took place as legislators met to approve a new cabinet. Witnesses said the parliamentary session carried on as normal after the blast, with 174 lawmakers out of the 199 present approving the cabinet.

Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi had named new ministers in August after Yusuf declared the earlier cabinet ineffective and dissolved it on Aug 7.

The explosion was the latest violence to flare up in the government's temporary seat of Baidoa.

In July, gunmen shot dead a Somali minister outside a Baidoa mosque, in what one senior official said was an organised killing.

Last year Gedi was the target of two assassination attempts in Mogadishu and Jowhar.

Somalia descended into lawlessness in 1991 when warlords toppled military dictator Mohamed Siad Barre and the country's 14th attempt at central administration since the ouster has been stymied by infighting and the newly empowered Islamists.

In a separate reminder of Somalia's lack of security, gunmen killed an Italian nun in the capital on Sunday -- in a blow to the Islamists' attempt to prove they have pacified one of the world's most dangerous cities.

REUTERS SSC KN1803