Kenyan police have arrested 29 Ugandans suspected of seeking to join Islamist rebels in Somalia, a police spokesman said Sunday.

The suspects were arrested in Nairobi and were "undergoing interrogation," Eric Kiraithe told AFP. "Police are investigating them because they are believed to have been headed to Somalia to fight" alongside Shebab rebels.

Gunmen killed six Kenyans including four policemen in the latest of a string of attacks in the northeastern border region with war-torn Somalia, police said Thursday.

Two other policemen were wounded in the attack some 100 kilometers (60 miles) from Somalia -- an area hit by a series of blasts in the three months since Nairobi sent troops into Somalia to fight Islamist Shebab insurgents.

Unidentified men attacked the main United Nations compound in the Somali capital Mogadishu, hurling two hand grenades that exploded near the wall, U.N. officials and witnesses said Wednesday.

According to witnesses, two grenades struck by the roadside next to the wall of the U.N. compound late Tuesday. Security guards in the compound opened fire in response, but no casualties were reported.

A former American soldier with specialist intelligence and cryptology training has been charged with trying to join Somalia's al-Qaida-linked Shebab militants, U.S. justice officials said Monday.

Craig Baxam, a 24-year-old from the Maryland suburbs outside Washington, appeared briefly in court Monday near the U.S. capital to hear charges that he attempted to join -- and provide material support to -- a terrorist group.

Fistfights erupted in Somalia's parliament late Wednesday as lawmakers elected a new speaker in a move condemned by the troubled nation's president as "null and void".

Several supporters of Sharif Hassan Sheikh Adan -- sacked as speaker in a controversial move last month by 280 MPS -- were injured in the latest of several parliamentary brawls.

Five people were killed in a New Year's Eve hand grenade attack and shooting in a bar in the eastern Kenyan town of Garissa near the border with Somalia, police said Sunday.

"There was an explosion in a club in town shortly before midnight (Saturday) and five people died," a senior police officer at Northeast provincial headquarters told AFP.

A gunman on Thursday killed a Western aid worker and seriously wounded his Indonesian colleague when he opened fire at a Doctors Without Borders compound in Mogadishu, police and medical sources said.

It was not immediately clear what motivated the attack in Mogadishu, which is the scene of frequent clashes pitting insurgents against pro-government troops and is often considered the world's most violent capital.

Fighter jets pounded rebel-held southern Somalia killing at least 10 people and wounding several others, the majority reportedly civilians, witnesses and Islamist militia commanders said Wednesday.

Military jets targeted several locations in Hosingow in the Lower Juba region, close to the Kenyan border late Tuesday, local elders said.

Three men who plotted a suicide attack against an Australian army base because they believed Islam was under threat from Western nations were sentenced Friday to more than 13 years in prison.

The men — Australian citizens originally from Somalia and Lebanon — were convicted last year of conspiring to plot a terrorist attack against Holsworthy Barracks, an army base on the outskirts of Sydney. Officials said the group planned to send a team of men with automatic rifles into the base in a bid to kill as many soldiers as possible.

U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon urged Somalia's al-Qaida-linked insurgents to end violence during a surprise visit Friday to war-torn Mogadishu, where he arrived wearing a bullet-proof jacket.

Flanked by a guard wearing a white U.N. helmet, Ban was welcomed at the airport by Prime Minister Abdiweli Mohamed Ali on the first visit by a U.N. chief to Mogadishu, often described as the world's most dangerous city, in almost two decades.