Somali parliament moves to oust dissident speaker

BAIDOA, Somalia, Jan 17 (Reuters) Somalia's interim parliament moved today to oust Speaker Sharif Hassan Sheikh Adan, who fell out with the president and prime minister late last year after he made peace overtures to Islamists.

Thirty-one members of parliament put forward the motion to impeach, and 190 out of the 275-member legislature were present.

''We are tabling the motion right now,'' Somali legislator Ali Basha told Reuters by phone from the parliament in a converted grain warehouse in the interim capital Baidoa. ''We will kick him out.'' The speaker, who had close ties to the Mogadishu businessmen who financed the Somalia Islamic Courts Council (SICC), made several attempts to strike peace deals between the government and the Islamist movement when it controlled most of the south.

But his manoeuvres incurred the wrath of President Abdullahi Yusuf and Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi, who said the power-sharing deal he cut did not have any government authority.

That preceded a late December offensive in which government troops bolstered by Ethiopian air and armour ran the Islamists out of their strongholds in Mogadishu and most of the south.

Adan, who has not been in parliament for months and was in Brussels yesterday to meet EU aid chief Louis Michel, could not immediately be reached for comment. Local media said he was in Djibouti, but that could not immediately be confirmed.

Somali sources close to the government said Yusuf's office had ordered a reshuffle today to trim the cabinet.

But government spokesman Abdirahman Dinari, speaking to Reuters by phone from Mogadishu, dismissed the reports.

''The government is busy disarming Somalia, and MPs are in parliament impeaching the speaker, so those reports are absolutely not true,'' he said.

REUTERS MS VV1602