At least four people were killed and 15 others wounded Friday in a car bomb attack at a hotel in Somalia's capital Mogadishu, according to an official government toll.

Ridwan Haji Abdiweli, spokesman of Somalia's prime minister, said there were four confirmed dead in the attack. A police official at the scene had earlier reported 11 dead. The Somalian president's spokesman, Abdirahman Omar Osman, said diplomat Abdulkadir Ali Dhuub, the country's acting ambassador to London, was among those killed.

Dozens of asylum-seekers on a boat that sank near the Italian coast last month with the loss of 366 lives were raped and tortured in Libya before starting their journey, the police said on Friday.

A group of 130 migrants from Eritrea were held for ransom in the desert, according to testimony from survivors that led to the arrest of a Somali man in Italy accused of being one of the traffickers.

The British government defended its terror prevention measures on Monday after a Somali-born suspect escaped surveillance by putting on a burqa during a visit to a mosque.

Mohammed Ahmed Mohamed, 27, who was subject to an order restricting his movements, entered a mosque in London on Friday wearing Western-style clothes but CCTV images showed him leaving disguised as a woman, with his face and body fully covered.

Kenya charged four men Monday in connection with the Westgate mall massacre in September, an attack claimed by Somalia's Al-Qaida linked Shebab in which at least 67 people were killed.

"The accused persons carried out a terrorist attack at Westgate Shopping Mall on September 21 by supporting a terrorist group," the charge sheet read.

Kenyan warplanes have destroyed a Shebab rebel camp in southern Somalia used to train gunmen who attacked Nairobi's Westgate shopping mall in September, Kenya's defense ministry said.

Many rebels were killed in the "major aerial offensive" conducted on Thursday, said a ministry statement issued later the same day.

A court in Madrid on Wednesday convicted six Somalis for piracy and sentenced them to between eight and 12 and a half years in jail for attacking a Spanish warship in 2012 off the coast of Somalia.

Spain's National Court, the country's top criminal court, convicted five men of piracy and arms possession and sentenced them to eight years each.

The U.N. Security Council will soon agree to authorize 4,000 more troops to boost the African force battling resurgent Shebab rebels in Somalia, diplomats said Wednesday.

The council is likely to allow a new upper limit of about 22,000 troops for the African Union force amid mounting warnings over the Shebab militant threat after the Nairobi shopping mall attack last month.

A senior militant in charge of suicide attacks for al-Qaida-linked Shebab rebels has been killed in a drone strike in southern Somalia, a Somali government official said Tuesday.

Interior Minister Abdikarin Hussein Guled told government radio that the Somali intelligence services have been tracking Ibrahim Ali Abdi, also known as Anta-Anta, for some time before the strike took place on Monday.

A United States military strike hit a vehicle carrying senior members of an al-Qaida-linked militant group in Somalia on Monday, killing at least two people including the group's top explosives expert, a militant and a government intelligence official said.

A senior U.S. military official told The Associated Press that there was a counterterrorism strike against a target in Somalia Monday but would give no further details. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because there was no authorization to discuss the strike publicly.

Nearly 700 refugees including dozens of Eritreans have been rescued off Sicily in five operations, as leaders grapple with the issue of illegal immigration at a European Union summit.

Patrol boats, navy vessels and a Maltese-flagged cargo vessel rescued asylum-seekers from five boats over the past 24 hours, the coastguard said in a statement on Friday.