Somali police ambushed and shot dead 17 fighters from the militant al Shabaab insurgent movement on Fridayduring an attempted attack on a senior official in Mogadishu, a police spokesman said. Islamist rebels, who have been fighting the government and its Ethiopian military allies for about two years, launch near-daily guerrilla strikes in the capital and control a small town just 14 km to the south.
The chaos has also helped fuel an explosion of piracy in waters off the Horn of Africa nation, where the seizure of a Saudi supertanker last weekend despite patrols by western navies has brought new calls for international action.
Witnesses said heavily-armed al Shabaab gunmen drove to the home of the local Madina district chairman early in the morning, but found police officers lying in wait.
''We got information before they left their hideouts and so we were able to surround them,'' said spokesman Abdullahi Hassan Barise.
''Thirteen of the dead bodies lie in the street near the chairman's house'' he added.
Residents said the Shabaab fighters wore black scarves round their heads with white Arabic script reading ''God is great.''
Islamist spokesmen could not be reached for comment.
Prime Minister Nur Hassan Hussein, who is backing a UN-brokered plan to bring moderate Islamists into a power-sharing government, has urged al Shabaab to join the process and ''give up their deeds and attitude''.
He told a news agency this week the extremists among Somalia's many Islamist factions were isolated.
''The hardliners are not so many, they are very few. But they are utilising young people, jobless people who are in need of their daily bread,'' he said.
''The doors are open to anybody joining the peace process.''
Somalis are traditionally moderate Muslims, and analysts say al Shabaab -- which Washington has listed as a foreign terrorist organisation with close links to al Qaeda -- does not have deep popular support, despite having the upper-hand militarily.
Somalia has been without effective central government since the 1991 toppling of a military dictator by warlords.
The US Navy and operators of the Saudi oil supertanker hijacked by Somali pirates could not confirm reports that the hijackers had demanded a 25 million dollar ransom.
Lieutenant Nathan Christensen, a spokesman for the Bahrain-based US Fifth Fleet, said the US Navy had no new information, but believed the vessel remained anchored off the Somali coast at Haradheere.
