Somali Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi opened a reconciliation workshop in Mogadishu on Monday designed to foster peace amid an escalating spate of guerrilla-style attacks in the volatile Horn of Africa nation.
In the latest assault, unknown assailants fired four rockets at Mogadishu port hours before Gedi began the week-long meeting of some 200 traditional leaders, plus peace and women's rights activists.
The pre-dawn rocket attack, which came from a residential area of the coastal city, was the latest in a series of almost daily strikes targeting Somali government installations and the administration's Ethiopian allies.
"Fortunately, the rockets plunged into the sea. No one was hurt and port operations are going on," Abdirahman Mohamed Warsame, in charge of security at the port, told Reuters.
Officials blame remnants of a defeated Islamist movement, which ran most of south Somalia for six months until it was ousted by a government-Ethiopian offensive over the New Year. Some Islamist fighters have vowed a holy war.
But many Mogadishu residents fear the violence in the capital may also be due to rivalry between warlords who ousted a dictator in 1991, carving Somalia into a patchwork of fiefdoms controlled by militias. Monday's attack came after a weekend visit by an African Union (AU) team assessing security prior to a planned deployment of peacekeepers in Somalia.
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