Se­cu­rity forces foiled an at­tempted sui­cide at­tack by Is­lamist mil­i­tants on a po­lit­i­cal con­fer­ence in cen­tral So­ma­lia on Thurs­day, killing three gun­men and the dri­ver of a car packed with ex­plo­sives, po­lice said.

The al Shabaab group, which fre­quently at­tacks of­fi­cials, politi­cians and law­mak­ers in its bid to top­ple the West­ern-backed gov­ern­ment in Mo­gadishu, claimed re­spon­si­bil­ity.

Al Shabaab’s spokesman for mil­i­tary op­er­a­tions, Sheikh Ab­di­a­sis Abu Musab, told Reuters shortly af­ter the at­tack that its gun­men were still fight­ing in­side. Of­fi­cials de­nied this. “A sui­cide car bomb rammed into the gate of the hall and three armed men stormed in but, for­tu­nately, AMI­SOM troops killed them be­fore they could en­ter,” said Ma­jor Nur Ahmed, a po­lice of­fi­cer, re­fer­ring to the African Union force AMI­SOM guard­ing the con­fer­ence hall in the town of Adado.

Lo­cal leader Hus­sein Farah said there was a brief fight but the gun­men were killed be­fore en­ter­ing the hall, where a meet­ing for a new cen­tral re­gion ad­min­is­tra­tion was be­ing held. So­ma­lia, which was torn apart by more than two decades of con­flict and clan ri­val­ries, is work­ing on build­ing a new fed­eral struc­ture to re­store or­der to the na­tion.

The hall was guarded by So­mali sol­diers and Ethiopian troops, part of the AMI­SOM force. Po­lice and other of­fi­cials said the car ex­ploded just out­side the gate af­ter the sol­diers spot­ted it and fired at it.

The three gun­men who had tried to storm in were shot dead, they said. AMI­SOM and the So­mali army launched a ma­jor of­fen­sive last year, push­ing al Shabaab out of ma­jor ur­ban strong­holds, but the group still con­trols some rural ar­eas from where the group has launched at­tacks in­side So­ma­lia and on neigh­bor­ing Kenya,