* Aweys dead or badly injured, family member tells Reuters

* Aweys’s house and surrounding area under heavy guard

* Bomb kills 3 in Mogadishu, gunmen kill radio journalist

By Abdi Sheikh and Abdi Guled

MOGADISHU, June 7 (Reuters) – Somali Islamist rebel leader Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys is dead or seriously injured, a family member told Reuters on Sunday.

His death would be a major blow to the rebels and a boost for President Sheikh Sharif Ahmed’s government, which had tried unsuccessfully to broker peace talks with the 62-year-old cleric.

Aweys, whom western security services say is close to al Qaeda, is an influential figure among the insurgents in Somalia, where he has headed various Islamist groups since the 1990s.

“We understand that Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys was brought yesterday to his brother’s house opposite the football stadium,” said the Aweys’s family member.

“We were denied access but confirmed there were doctors in the area… The mood looks like he is dead. The whole area is surrounded by gunmen and there is no access,” he added, of the house close to Mogadishu’s football stadium.

A pro-government militia said its fighters shot Aweys during battles in Wabho town on Friday, and he died of wounds later. But Aweys’s movement, Hizbul Islam, denied that as propaganda.

There were also rumours among militia fighters that another rebel leader, Hassan Turki had died

In one of the worst flare-ups of the year, 123 people died in fighting for Wabho, mainly on Friday, between the joint forces of al Shabaab insurgents and Aweys’s group, and the pro-government moderate Islamist militia Ahla Sunna Waljamaca.

An Islamist insurgency since early 2007 — the latest cycle in 19 years of conflict in Somalia — has killed around 18,000 civilians and thousands more fighters.

It has also drawn foreign jihadists into Somalia, enabled piracy to flourish offshore and unsettled the whole region, with East African neighbours on high security alert.

BOMB KILLS 3, HITMEN KILL JOURNALIST

In Mogadishu where al Shabaab have been battling the security forces of president Ahmed, three people died on Sunday when a remote control mine meant for a police car struck a civillian vehicle.

“The police car was driving at high speed and the bomb missed it and struck a civilian car which was behind the police car,” eyewitness Abdullahi Farah Nor told Reuters.

Gunmen in the capital also shot and killed Mukhtar Mohamed Hirabe, director of privately owned radio station Shabelle, and injured a collegue.

“They shot the director in the head and he died on the spot,” an eyewitness told Reuters.

Hirabe, 48, is the fifth journalist murdered this year in Somalia, one of the most dangerous places in the world for reporters to operate.

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