Britons have been injured or captured in the recent military action against Islamist militias in Somalia, the Ethiopian Prime Minister claimed today.

Ethiopian forces intervened in Somalia in late December, helping the country's weak official government to rout a collection of Islamist militias that had controlled the capital, Mogadishu, and much of the country since June.

Today, as the US confirmed that it had entered the war, conducting an airstrike against suspected al-Qaeda figures sheltering among the Islamist fighters, the Ethiopian Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi, said that Britons had been among the various foreign extremists shot or captured during the conflict.

"Many international terrorists are dead in Somalia," Mr Meles was quoted as saying by Le Monde, the French newspaper. "Photographs have been taken and passports from different countries have been collected. The Kenyans are holding Eritrean and Canadian passport holders."

"We have injured people coming from Yemen, Pakistan, Sudan, the United Kingdom."

In London, the Foreign Office said it could not confirm the reports, but a spokeswoman observed that those caught up in the fighting could hold dual nationality. Present-day northern Somalia was a British protectorate from 1887 to 1960.

"We take these reports very seriously and will do everything we can to look into them," she said. "We are in constant touch with the Ethiopian and Somalian governments and will look into this matter."

There are strong links between the UK and the Somalian transitional government, which was set up in 2004 under a UN mandate. Until the recent conflict, the government, which is the 13th attempt to restore central rule to Somalia after 15 years of near-anarchy, had been too weak to operate across much of the country and conducted much of its business from Nairobi, the capital of Kenya.

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