MOGADISHU, October 16, 2007 - Three children were killed Monday when a mortar hit a house in the Somali town of Beledweyne north of the capital Mogadishu, police and witnesses said Monday.

The latest fatalities come amid deadly clashes between breakaway Somaliland and Puntland, a pair of impovrished enclaves in northern Somalia, over the precise path of their frontier. Several people were killed.

"We see the tragedy that came upon those innocent children and we are investigating where the artillery shell came from and who is behind this grave incident," local police chief Colonel Abdi Adan told reporters.

"They were inside the house when an unknown explosive thing rocked the house and none of them survived. No one can tell what the hell that explosion was," said Hussein Kalga'al, a resident of the town 300 kilometres (186 miles) north of Mogadishu.

"We could not classify the bodies of the children because the heavy artillery shell destroyed the part of the house they were playing in," Osman Adan, another resident, said.

Other witnesses said that the oldest child was 12.

Somali authorities imposed a nighttime curfew in the town of Baidoa, about 250 kilometres (155 miles) northwest of the capital, where the transitional parliament is based.

The curfew was imposed days after a suicide bomber rammed a vehicle into an Ethiopian army base, killing three soldiers, in a bid to assassinate Somali Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi.

Assailants overnight Sunday hurled a grenade into a restaurant in Baidoa wounding civilians.

Somali lawmakers are set to resume parliamentary session, where supporters of President Abdillahi Yusuf Ahmed and those of Gedi will face off over the legitimacy of the government.

At least 22 cabinet ministers have threatened to resign if Gedi fails to call a motion of confidence on his splintered government.

The troubled country has had no consistent central authority since former dictator Mohamed Siyad Barre was toppled in 1991, touching off a deadly power struggle that has defied numerous internationally-backed peace initiatives.

Islamist militants were defeated early this year by Somali troops supported by the Ethiopian army in some of the deadliest clashes in the nation of about 10 million.

Since then, their fighters have carried out a string of guerilla attacks mainly in the capital Mogadishu, targeting government officials, Ethiopian troops and African Union peacekeepers.

Source: AFP