Kuala Lumpur - Somali pirates have released a Malaysian oil tanker after holding the vessel and its 41-member crew hostage for more than a month, reports said Monday.

The MT Bunga Melati 5 tanker was hijacked in the Gulf of Aden off Yemen on August 29, and its crew of Malaysian and Filipino nationals taken hostage.

Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi said late Sunday that the pirates have released the ship, and all remaining crew members were safe.

"All its crew members have been released and the vessel is now heading to Djibouti. The crew members are all in good health," he said.

Athens  - Pirates captured a tanker off the coast of Somalia, a Greek shipping company reported Saturday.

According to the Greek coastguard, 19 Romanian sailors were aboard the tanker Genious which was sailing under a Liberian flag.

The attack was reported to the shipping company by the ship's captain by radio shortly before the pirates boarded the vessel. The pirates fired a number shots into the air to bring the ship to a halt.

Nairobi - Pirates have seized a Ukrainian cargo ship carrying tanks off the coast of Somalia, a maritime official confirmed Friday.

"The ship was grabbed yesterday evening as it sailed to (the Kenyan port of) Mombasa," Andrew Mwangura of the East African Seafarers' Assistance Programme told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa. "It was carrying military equipment, including tanks."

The Russian Interfax news agency late Thursday reported that the Belize-flagged vessel was carrying a shipment of 30 T-72 tanks, armoured personnel carriers and munitions. The shipment was bound for South Sudan.

Nairobi/Mogadishu - Fresh clashes between Islamic insurgents and African Union peacekeepers have broken out in the Somali capital Mogadishu, reports said Wednesday.

The BBC reported that insurgents attacked the AU peacekeepers, who responded with tank and artillery fire, late on Tuesday night.

Some of the AU fire landed in residential neighbourhoods, killing at least ten civilians, eyewitnesses told the BBC.

No AU casualties were reported.

Heavy clashes have been ongoing since insurgents shelled Mogadishu airport last Friday as an AU plane defied a flight ban.

No planes had landed since Tuesday after insurgent group al- Shabaab said it would destroy any aircraft that attempted to touch down at the airport.

Mogadishu  - Somali gunmen have kidnapped two Western aid workers from a town near the Ethiopian border, residents said Tuesday.

"We are not aware of their nationalities, but they are a white man and a white woman," Ali Isse Osman, a resident in the town of Gura'el, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

Osman said that the pair were abducted from the border town of Las Anod and then brought to Gura'el, 530 kilometres north of Mogadishu.

Criminal gangs looking for ransom and Islamic insurgents battling Somalia's transitional federal government often target foreigners for abduction.

Nairobi/Mogadishu - At least six civilians have died after shells targeting African Union peacekeeping bases in Mogadishu went astray, reports said Monday.