By Tsegaye Tadesse

An Islamist militiaman mans an anti-aircraft gun mounted on a pick-up truck inside a former government building in Mogadishu, Somalia August 16, 2006 .

ADDIS ABABA, September 26, 2006 – Ethiopia on Tuesday dismissed claims it had sent more troops into neighboring Somalia as a propaganda smokescreen by Islamist "extremists" to cover their own "illegal actions".

The radical Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) seized the southern Somali port city of Kismayo on Monday, the latest triumph for the Islamists who have rapidly expanded their grip on Somalia since they captured the capital Mogadishu in June.

Ethiopia, long the most powerful country in the Horn of Africa, believes the Islamists aspire to taking Ethiopia's eastern Ogaden region -- inhabited by ethnic Somalis -- as part of a plan to restore "Greater Somalia."

Ethiopia has invaded Somalia in the past to attack Islamist radicals, but has consistently denied reports it has sent troops into Somalia to prop up the interim government in the provincial town of Baidoa since the Islamists took Mogadishu.

The Mogadishu-based Islamist movement said Ethiopia had moved hundreds more soldiers across the border on Monday.

"There is no Ethiopian soldier who crossed into Somali territory," Ambassador Solomon Abebe, head of information for Ethiopia's Foreign Affairs Ministry, told Reuters.

CEASEFIRE UNDER THREAT

Local residents backed up the Islamists' charge, and most independent analysts of the Somali crisis believe anti-Islamist Ethiopia has sent troops across the border in recent months.

But Solomon said the latest UIC accusation was meant to divert attention from their capture of Kismayo on Monday in a major expansion of their grip on Somalia's south.

"It is the usual propaganda of the extremists in the UIC which they utter every time they take illegal actions," he said.

"The extremists in UIC are known to use Ethiopia as a scapegoat to hide their true motive and hoodwink international public opinion through false propaganda."

He said Ethiopia, which backs President Abdillahi Yusuf's government and has long condemned the Islamist movement as led by "terrorists", regarded the capture of Kismayo as a breach of a ceasefire agreement reached in Sudan talks.

The Islamists have held two rounds of talks in Khartoum with Yusuf's government since they kicked U.S.-led warlords out of Mogadishu in June and proceeded to take other towns in the area.

The capture of Kismayo gives them control of all Somalia's ports outside the self-declared independent enclave of Somaliland and the semi-autonomous province of Puntland. It also means they now effectively flank the government on three sides.

Source: Reuters