MOGADISHU, Feb 10 (AFP) - Mogadishu's improvised police force on Thursday boosted security around a hotel housing foreigners where unknown gunmen shot and killed a BBC journalist in Somalia's anarchic bullet-scarred capital.
Amid international condemnation of Wednesday's murder of 39-year-old BBC producer Kate Peyton, other foreign journalists here began to leave the lawless city, with at least six departing due to security concerns.
A commander in Mogadishu's recently formed police brigade, Abdi Hassan Qeydid, said patrols had been increased in the area around the Sahafi Hotel in the southern part of the city where Peyton was shot.
He said there had been no arrests yet but that officers were questioning anyone who might have seen the shooting, which witnesses said was carried out by gunmen who sped off in a white saloon car that was later found abandoned.
"The police patrol in the area has been increased to take care of safety," Qeydid told AFP. "More policemen and armed vehicles have been deployed at the site where the journalist was shot.
"They are questioning everybody who might have witnessed the shooting and those suspected of links with the killing," he said.
Although the capital was relatively calm, at least six foreign journalists, who like Peyton had travelled to Mogadishu to cover the relocation from exile in Kenya of the country's transitional government, decided to leave the city, colleagues said.
Peyton's body was flown from Somalia to the Kenyan capital Nairobi on Thursday afternoon ahead of a transfer to Britain for burial in coming days, according to the BBC office in Nairobi.
In addition, three US nationals working for a relief agency left Mogadishu for Djibouti, officials said.
Meanwhile, condemnations of Peyton's slaying -- ten years to the day after the last foreign journalist, an Italian, was killed in Somalia -- poured in.
Somali Prime Minister Mohamed Ali Gedi, who had just announced plans to begin relocating the government to Mogadishu from Nairobi when Peyton was shot on Wednesday, described the killing as a "savage act".
"Those behind the killing will be punished," he told AFP by telephone from the Kenyan capital.
Parliament speaker Shariff Hassan Sheikh Aden, part of a team of lawmakers now in Mogadishu to assess security conditions for the relocation described the murder as "inhuman," "against the law" and "cowardly."
The chairman of Mogadishu's Joint Islamic Court, Sheikh Shariff Sheikh Ahmed, also condemned Peyton's murder.
"The killing was an act of banditry which will never be accepted by the God-abiding Islamic courts of Mogadishu," he said. "The incident shows the need for the establishment of Islamic courts that can fight violence in accordance to the commands of God and the teaching his prophet Mohammed."
Peyton, who was shot just hours after arriving in the city, died late Wednesday at Mogadishu's Medina hospital.
Britain's Foreign Office said it was "shocked and saddened" by Peyton's death and offered condolences to her friends and family.
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and Paris-based Reporters without Borders (RSF) condemned the attack and called on the transitional government to bring the perpetrators to justice.
"If there were any need, this cowardly attack on a journalist shows that it is imperative that a democratic state, guaranteeing the freedom and safety of its citizens, be rebuilt as soon as possible in Somalia," RSF said.
Peyton, raised in Africa, had worked for the BBC as a producer and reporter since 1993 and had been based in Johannesburg for a number of years, according to the broadcaster.
Somalia has not had a functional government and has been a theater of anarchic bloodletting since the 1991 ouster of strongman Mohammad Siad Barre plunged the country into a patchwork of fiefdoms governed by unruly warlords.
Between 1993 and 1998, 10 journalists were killed in Somalia, either by mob attacks, shootings or knifings.
Nine of them were foreign correspondents slain between 1993 and 1995, when the United Nations and United States sent missions that failed to restore stability in the country owing to violent animosity with local warlords.
In clashes that ensued, thousands of Somalis died along with 140 UN peacekeepers as well as 18 US special forces personnel.

02/10/2005 16:59 GMT - AFP