A Somali journalist died in Mogadishu Saturday after a bomb believed to have been attached to his car was remotely detonated, police and witnesses said.

The victim, prominent local journalist Yusuf Keynan, was working with Mustaqbal radio, a private Mogadishu FM station, and also contributed to the Nairobi-based U.N. humanitarian radio Ergo.

The United States said Friday it was evacuating some of its Kenyan embassy staff due to security risks in the wake of attacks by al-Qaida-linked Shebab militants that left dozens dead.

Travel restrictions have been put into place for government personnel and "based on the recent changes in Kenya's security situation, the embassy is also relocating some staff to other countries," the State Department said.

A Briton on trial in Kenya for plotting bomb attacks possessed chemicals capable of making an explosion, a government chemist told a court in the port city of Mombasa Thursday.

Suspected British militant Jermaine Grant, accused of ties to Somalia's al-Qaida-linked Shebab and plotting attacks, was arrested in December 2011 in Mombasa with various chemicals, batteries and switches, which prosecutors say he planned to use to make explosives. He denies the charges.

Kenyan security forces on Thursday killed five people suspected of involvement in massacres earlier this week in the country's coastal Lamu region, the interior ministry and a military source said.

In a statement released via Twitter, the ministry said there were five "suspected attackers shot dead while escaping", and that three AK-47 assault rifles as well as ammunition were recovered at the scene.

Somalia's Shebab rebels on Wednesday repeated claims they were responsible for two consecutive massacres in Kenya, the day after Kenya's president insisted that "local political networks" and not the Al-Qaida-linked group were to blame.

"The attack in Mpeketoni was ordered by the mujahedeen high command to retaliate for Kenya's killing of Muslims in Somalia and Kenya. The Islamic fighters answered to that holy call," Shebab's military spokesman, Abdulaziz Abu Musab, said in a news conference broadcast by Shebab's radio.

Kenyan police said they arrested several suspects Wednesday amid high political tension in the wake of twin massacres on the coast, claimed by Somalia's Islamist Shebab but blamed by the president on local political networks.

The assault on the town of Mpeketoni late on Sunday and a nearby village the following night left at least 60 dead, and were the worst attacks since last September's Shebab attack on the Westgate shopping mall in the capital in which 67 were killed.

Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta on Tuesday blamed "local political networks", and not Somalia's Shebab militants, for the killings of dozens in two consecutive nights of attacks in the coastal region.

"This... was not an al-Shebab attack. Evidence indicates that local political networks were involved in the planning and execution of a heinous crime," he said in a televised address to the nation. "This also played into the opportunist network of other criminal gangs."

At least 64 people have been killed in two consecutive nights of carnage in Kenya's coastal region, officials said Tuesday, with the Kenyan president blaming "local political networks" and Somalia's Shebab insisting they were responsible.

Over 50 people are missing following the massacres, the Red Cross said, with scores first fleeing an attack overnight Sunday in the town of Mpeketoni in which at least 49 people were killed, and then a second in the nearby village of Poromoko late Monday where gunmen slaughtered 15 people.

Suspected Shebab militants from Somalia stormed into a Kenyan coastal town, killing at least 49 people in a major assault on a police station, hotels and government offices, officials said Monday.

Around 50 heavily-armed gunmen drove into the town of Mpeketoni, near the coastal island and popular tourist resort of Lamu, late on Sunday, officials said.

Israel’s Ambassador to the U.N. Ron Prosor has accused Hizbullah and Iran of launching a campaign of terror against the Jewish State, urging the international community to find an “antidote” to eradicate the virus of terrorism.

“Israelis are the targets of a terror campaign directed by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and Hizbullah,” Prosor told the 94th plenary meeting of the U.N. General Assembly on Thursday.