SOMALIA: Some Somali lawmakers threw punches and wrestled on the floor after the prime minister, Ali Mohamed Gedi, survived a crucial confidence vote that could have led to the collapse of his government.
Armed police entered parliament to separate four brawling members of parliament and escort Mr Gedi out during several minutes of chaos after he survived the censure motion, witnesses said.
Mr Gedi won 88 votes to his opponents' 126 - short of the two-thirds majority they needed to censure him - in an old grain store converted into Somalia's temporary parliament.
Defeat would have sparked the dissolution of the interim government's executive, already in some disarray over the threat from an Islamist movement that has taken the capital, Mogadishu, and a large part of southern Somalia.
"Whatever we were accused of we will try to rectify," Mr Gedi told about 200 supporters who celebrated later outside his home. "I thank those who brought the motion because they proved that we have democracy."
The anti-Gedi faction had argued he was incompetent and his removal was necessary to create a post for Mogadishu's new Islamist rulers to come into government.
However, the Islamists' top leader said machinations within government did not affect their position of refusing talks until pro-government Ethiopian troops leave Somali soil.
"We don't care whether it's a single soldier or a whole battalion ... as long as they are in our country, we will not attend," Islamist leader Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys said of efforts to get both sides to talks in Sudan.
Islamists took Mogadishu and other southern towns last month from US-backed warlords, denting the western-backed government's aspiration to restore central rule to Somalia for the first time since the 1991 overthrow of a dictator.
In a separate development, the first conventional passenger aircraft in 15 years landed at Mogadishu's recently reopened international airport yesterday, residents said.