World in brief: U.S. official escapes mortar fire

Assailants fired mortar shells at the Mogadishu airport as a plane carrying an American congressman took off Monday, officials said. The plane departed safely, but 19 Somalis were reported wounded in surrounding residential areas.

U.S. Rep. Don Payne, who met with Somalia’s top leaders during his one-day visit, said that he had no idea of the violence until reaching Kenya after the flight from Mogadishu, one of the most dangerous cities in the world and rarely visited by foreign travelers.

“We found out when we arrived in Nairobi,” the chairman of the House subcommittee on Africa told the Associated Press. He said that the aircraft noise probably drowned out the sound of the mortars.

The Islamic extremist group al-Shabab claimed responsibility in a posting on a militant Web site, saying it launched the mortar barrage after learning of Payne’s visit, according to the terrorism monitoring group SITE.

Payne’s meetings came just hours after a high-seas standoff between the U.S. and pirates who seized an American sea captain ended with U.S. Navy snipers killing three pirates and freeing the seaman.

Baghdad

Extremists take credit for bombings

The Islamic State of Iraq, an umbrella group for extremist organizations including al-Qaida in Iraq, asserted responsibility Monday for a bombing that killed five U.S. soldiers last week in the deadliest attack on American troops in Iraq in more than a year.

The group also said it carried out a suicide bombing that killed at least eight Sunni Muslim armed guards outside an Iraqi army station south of Baghdad.

Also Monday, a U.S. soldier was killed by an armor-piercing roadside bomb near Karbala, a city in southern Iraq where such attacks have been rare in recent years. The U.S. military said a convoy was struck by an explosively formed projectile, or EFP, at 7:40 a.m. roughly three miles south of Karbala.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan

Zardari agrees to impose Islamic law

Pakistan’s president bowed to Islamists’ demands Monday and agreed to impose Islamic law in part of the country’s North West Frontier province, and al-Qaida-allied militants overran a neighboring district just 60 miles from the capital of Islamabad.

The takeover in Buner in the past several days, with almost no resistance from Pakistani security forces, marked a major advance for the militants, and the government’s endorsement of Islamic law in Swat further increased their political clout.

President Asif Ali Zardari signed the agreement to introduce sharia Islamic law in Swat, a huge valley in the North West Frontier province, a few hours after parliament, under what amounted to a death threat from the Pakistani Taliban, unanimously approved a resolution backing the move.

The Pakistani capital itself was on high alert and all but sealed off following threats of a terrorist attack,

From wire reports