Children killed in attack on Somali government meeting

(CNN) -- Suspected Islamic insurgents fired mortar rounds at a Somali government meeting in Mogadishu on Thursday, barely missing the target but striking a nearby village, killing six civilians -- most of them children -- a government spokesman told CNN.

Somali Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi -- the target of several assassination attempts -- had just left the national reconciliation conference when the attack happened, spokesman Abdi Gobdon said.

It is unclear if he was the target of the attack, which comes amid days of heavy fighting in the Somali capital.

Most of the attacks are aimed at Somali transitional government officials working on national reconciliation, according to a spokesman for the African Union's military mission in Somalia.

The African Union Mission in Somalia, or AMISOM, is charged with helping the war-torn country rebuild.

The force also is helping to protect the transitional government, backed by the United Nations, which is struggling to establish order after more than 15 years without a functioning central authority.

Mogadishu has been a persistent hotbed of violence spawned by Somali government forces and remnant fighters from the Islamic Courts Union, which was ousted from power late last year by Ethiopian troops. Somali forces are backed by Ethiopian troops.

Washington has accused the Islamic movement of harboring fugitives from the al Qaeda terrorist network, including a suspect in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The United States backed the Ethiopian invasion.

The U.N.-backed transitional government, which had been exiled in the city of Baidoa, moved back to Mogadishu following the ouster of the Islamic rulers. E-mail to a friend

CNN's Ronnie Mayanja contributed to this report.

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