MOGADISHU (AFP) — A Ugandan presidential envoy to Somalia on Friday said Kampala was brokering peace between the country's embattled government and its opponents as violence claimed eight people in the capital.
Ngoma Ngime said he had held talks with President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, who supported the latest initiative, but was yet to meet the opposition groups in yet another attempt to seek stability in the war-torn country.
"We are facilitating negotiation between the Somali Transitional Federal government and those opposing the institution," Ngime told a press conference in Mogadishu.
"The meditation effort will involve those who are fighting the government inside the country and opposition groups that are based in Asmara," the capital of neighbouring Eritrea, he explained.
"Our initiative is serious as we really need peace in Somalia," Ngime added said.
Meanwhile, insurgents killed eight people, including two government prosecutors, in Mogadishu Friday, officials and witnesses said.
"At least five people were killed in Bakara (a volatile area of the capital)," a government official told AFP.
Of the five, two worked in the office of the prosecutor general, said the official, declining to be named.
A pro-insurgency website -- heegan.net -- claimed responsibility for the attacks.
Meanwhile, unidentified gunmen also killed a former senior army officer, General Ahmed Jilow Addow, his driver and a third person in northern Mogadishu, a hospital official told AFP.
Addow -- a former Mogadishu governor during the ousted regime of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre -- and the two others died of injuries, the official said. Police confirmed the killings.
Despite the Ugandan peace initiative, opposition groups, including the recently-formed Alliance for the Re-Liberation of Somalia (ARS), have vowed not to enter into dialogue with the interim government until Ethiopia withdraws its troops from the country.
Ethiopian forces, backing government fighters, ousted an Islamist movement from south and central Somalia at the start of the year and an unknown number remain in the country.
The Islamists make up part of the ARS and back the deadly insurgency against Ethiopian and government troops.
Uganda, which has deployed a vanguard force of at least 1,500 peacekeepers to the African Union Mission to Somalia (AMISOM), has also pledged to help train a Somali police force.
Other African nations are yet to contribute to the force although the AU had pledged to deploy 8,000 peacekeepers to help President Yusuf tighten his tenuous grip across the country.
A government-sponsored reconciliation conference ended in Mogadishu in August in failure, prompting foreign diplomats to press for a new and all-inclusive approach to rescue Somalia from deeper turmoil.
The opposition groups boycotted the Mogadishu talks and followed up with their own meeting in Asmara, where they formed the ARS coalition.
Somalia has lacked an effective government since the 1991 ouster of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre touched off a deadly clan-based power struggle that has defied numerous efforts to restore stability.