Al-Qaida's leaders have set up cells of engineers to try to shoot down, disable or hijack U.S. drones, The Washington Post reported late Tuesday citing top-secret U.S. intelligence documents.

The al-Qaida leadership is "hoping to exploit the technological vulnerabilities of a weapons system that has inflicted huge losses against the terrorist network," the Post said online.

Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud escaped unhurt Tuesday from an ambush on his heavily armoured convoy claimed by Al-Qaeda linked Islamists, the latest attack targeting the internationally backed leader.

Shebab gunmen claimed to have ambushed the convoy as it travelled to the port of Merka south of the capital and boasted of destroying vehicles with rocket-propelled grenades.

Somalia's government has demanded U.N. sanctions be lifted from a businessman accused of being a chief financier for al-Qaida inspired insurgents fighting the internationally-backed authorities, the information minister said Sunday.

Banker and businessman Ali Ahmed Nur Jimale, who was placed on a United Nations Security Council sanction list in February 2012, is accused of being "one of al-Shebab's chief financiers", according to the U.N.

The Italian coast guard said Saturday it had rescued more than 200 migrants off Sicily, swelling the ranks of the thousands of boat people who have made the crossing thanks to calm summer waters.

A group of 116, most of them Somalis, were drifting in the Canal of Sicily on a small rubber dinghy when they were spotted by a navy vessel and taken to the island of Lampedusa by the coastguard.

African troops in Somalia said they thwarted an attack Thursday by Islamist Shebab fighters on their base in the southern port city of Kismayo.

The African Union troops repulsed the al-Qaida-linked Shebab when they first attacked on Wednesday evening, the force, AMISOM, said in a statement.

Somalia's government vowed Wednesday to deliver justice in the case of a local woman who alleged she was gang raped by African Union troops and Somali soldiers.

"My team and I are committed to getting to the bottom of this case, and all other allegations of sexual violence," Somalia's minster for human development, Maryan Qasim, said in a statement Wednesday.

An attack blamed on Somali Islamist insurgents left four people dead in eastern Kenya and prompted hundreds to flee into the bush, authorities and the Red Cross said Saturday.

"There was an attack (near) Garissa," a high-ranking interior ministry official, Mutea Iringo, told AFP. "Heavily armed Shebab carried out a raid on a police post in Galmagala. A police officer died."

Aid workers in war-torn Somalia are struggling to contain a dangerous outbreak of the crippling polio virus, with rampant insecurity hampering efforts, the United Nations said Friday.

Six years after the Horn of Africa nation was declared free of the virus, at least 105 cases have been confirmed in Somalia, the "worst outbreak in the world in a non-endemic country," the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in a statement.

The African Union force fighting in Somalia is investigating the alleged gang rape of a woman by its soldiers, a case that has sparked outrage in Mogadishu, the AU said Thursday.

A Somali woman has alleged she was abducted, drugged and then repeatedly raped earlier this month by soldiers from both the national army and from AMISOM, the 17,700-strong African Union force that supports the internationally backed government.

Medical aid agency Doctors Without Borders (MSF) closed all its operations in war-torn Somalia on Wednesday, warning of growing insecurity, after 22 years of working in the Horn of Africa troublespot.

"The closure of our activities is a direct result of extreme attacks on our staff, in an environment where armed groups and civilian leaders increasingly support, tolerate, or condone the killing, assaulting, and abducting of humanitarian aid workers," MSF president Unni Karunakara told reporters.