MOGADISHU, July 17, 2007 (AFP) - Three people were killed Tuesday in separate grenade attacks in Mogadishu, according to police and witnesses in the violence-ridden Somali capital.

A policeman was killed and three civilians wounded when attackers hurled a grenade at police patrolling in the Bakara district in southern Mogadishu, while two civilians died in a separate grenade explosion in a crowded Bakara market.

"We have not seen the assailant ... but we shall keep tracking all those trying to destabilise the city," police officer Abdullahi Madobe told AFP.

Duale Moalim Hashi, a grocer at Bakara, said: "Two men were killed in this explosion and their bodies lay in front of my shop."

Since late April when a joint Somali-Ethiopia force quelled an Islamist insurgency, dozens of civilians and government officials have been killed or wounded in a string of attacks blamed on remnants of the Islamist movement.

At the weekend, attackers fired seven mortar shells in a nothern Mogadishu district, two of which exploded near the venue of a peace conference aimed at pacifying factions that have been locked in years of bloodletting.

The lawless Horn of Africa nation plunged into violence with the 1991 ouster of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre and more than a dozen attempts at restoring peace have failed.

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