A former Somali foreign minister, Hussein Elabe Faahiye, is among five people killed by a car bomb in the capital, Mogadishu, the country’s information minister said.
Mr Faahiye had served under the former prime minister, Ali Mohammed Ghedi, in 2007.
The blast struck a convoy escorting officials and lawmakers to the presidential palace, the AFP news agency reports.
A tweet by a police official, quoted by the agency, said officers had stopped “a vehicle loaded with explosives, which was aiming to target a security forces base”.
Several vehicles were also destroyed in the blast. Images from Mogadishu showed a plume of white smoke above the scene of the attack.
Al-Qaeda-linked al-Shabab fighters regularly mount attacks in Mogadishu, as part of a decade-long insurgency against the government. They were expelled from the capital in 2011 but retain control of large areas of the country. BBC News
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