MOGADISHU, July 17: Three people were killed on Tuesday in separate grenade attacks in Mogadishu, according to police and witnesses in the violence-ridden Somali capital. A policeman was killed and three civilians wounded when attackers hurled a grenade at police patrolling in the Bakara district in southern Mogadishu, while two civilians died in a separate grenade explosion in a crowded Bakara market.

“We have not seen the assailant ... but we shall keep tracking all those trying to destabilise the city,” police officer Abdullahi Madobe said.

Duale Moalim Hashi, a grocer at Bakara, said: “Two men were killed in this explosion and their bodies lay in front of my shop.” Since late April when a joint Somali-Ethiopia force quelled an Islamist insurgency, dozens of civilians and government officials have been killed or wounded in a string of attacks blamed on remnants of the Islamist movement.

At the weekend, attackers fired seven mortar shells in a nothern Mogadishu district, two of which exploded near the venue of a peace conference aimed at pacifying factions that have been locked in years of bloodletting.—AFP