By Aweys Yusuf
MOGADISHU (Reuters) - A bomb blast killed three children in southern Somalia and wounded four others on Sunday, witnesses and doctors said.
Locals said the children had been playing with the device, which they found in the Yunbis village, 65 km (40 miles) south of the capital Mogadishu.
"We heard a huge bomb blast. We ran to the site where we saw two dead children and four wounded. We rushed them to hospital in Afgooye," witness Hassan Muridi told Reuters by telephone.
Dr. Nur Abdi Abdule, the head of the hospital, said a third child later died on the operating table. "The condition of two of the others is very serious," he said.
Somalia is littered with landmines and unexploded munitions from the years of anarchy that followed the defeat of dictator Mohammed Siad Barre by warlords in 1991.
In a separate incident late on Saturday, officials said unidentified gunmen had killed a prominent Islamic religious leader and a night watchman working for the Somali Red Crescent in the southcentral town of Baidoa, where parliament sits.
"They were leaving a mosque when they were shot dead by three men armed with pistols," said lawmaker Ibrahim Isaq Yarow.
Somalia's interim government faces a persistent insurgency from Islamist-led guerrillas. Fighting in Mogadishu killed 6,500 civilians last year, a local human rights group says.
SOURCE: Reuters, January 13, 2008