Somalia on Friday confirmed the death of Shebab commander Yusuf Dheeq in a U.S. drone strike south of Mogadishu last week.

"The killing of terrorist leaders through precision, low risk strikes such as this one, increases the opportunities for bringing peace and stability back to Somalia," the government said in a statement.

At least five people were killed Thursday in a suicide car bombing against a hotel in Mogadishu on the eve of a visit to the Somali capital by Turkey's president, police said.

Sources at the hotel, situated close to the heavily-fortified presidential palace, said there were around 70 members of a Turkish delegation in the hotel at the time, but none of them were killed or seriously hurt in the blast.

East African foreign ministers met in Mogadishu on Saturday to push peace efforts in war-torn Somalia, the first time the regional bloc has met in the country for almost three decades.

Dozens of heavily armed soldiers and police patrolled the streets, where Al-Qaeda-affiliated Shebab militants regularly carry out bombings and killings.

The United States "strongly condemns" a Shebab attack that killed three soldiers and a civilian at African Union headquarters in Somalia, the State Department said Friday.

The assault, launched by the country's Al-Qaida-linked rebels in Mogadishu on Thursday, killed three soldiers from the union's local peacekeeping mission known as AMISOM, and a civilian contractor.

A U.S.-Somali engineer who had come back to his birth nation to help rebuild the war-torn country has become the latest returning expat to be shot dead by suspected Islamic extremists, his relatives told Agence France Presse. 

The killing of Abdulahi Ali Anshur marks the latest in a string of murders of Somali diaspora who have returned to the country and were apparently targeted by Al-Qaeda affiliated Shebab militants because they work with the internationally-backed government.

At least one person was killed and two others wounded on Saturday in a car bombing in Somalia's capital Mogadishu, police said.

"One person... was killed and two others wounded this morning after a bomb attached to the car was remotely detonated," said Mohamed Dahir, a police commander in the Hodon district where the explosion happened.

At least one person was killed and several others wounded on Saturday in a car bombing outside a hotel in Somalia's capital Mogadishu, officials said.

A Somali police official, General Mohamed Yusuf Madale, told reporters the car bomb went off outside the Golden Hotel shortly after midday, "killing at least one person and injuring another one."

Over a million people in war-torn Somalia are struggling in conditions close to famine, with hunger and drought due to worsen, United Nations experts said Tuesday.

Somalia's Shebab rebels carried out a major car bomb and gun attack against an intelligence headquarters in central Mogadishu on Sunday, leaving at least seven militants and four others dead.

The al-Qaida-linked militia claimed responsibility for the raid against the complex, which also houses a major detention facility, saying it was being used for the "torture and humiliation" of "innocent Muslims."

A military court in Somalia has sentenced two Islamist Shebab gunmen to death for killing a journalist, the information minister said Saturday.