U.N. Seeks to Shift Somalia Focus From Aidid : Africa: Troops continue hunt for warlord, but officials cite opening for disarmament, rebuilding. Calm returns to capital.

One day after the most aggressive operation since the United Nations arrived here to fend off starvation, U.N. troops on Friday continued hunting for Mohammed Farah Aidid even as U.N. officials sought to direct public focus away from the fugitive warlord.

“Clearly, we have identified Aidid as a likely suspect in the atrocities of June 5,” said retired U.S. Navy Adm. Jonathan Howe, the U.N. special representative for Somalia, referring to an ambush in Mogadishu that left 23 Pakistani peacekeeping soldiers dead. “And we feel he should be detained and out of the way at this particular time.”

But, added Howe, “We did not want to confuse the effort to arrest Aidid with the military operation. He has never been a target of the military operation.”

U.S. Army Lt. Col. Kevin McGovern was quoted by the Associated Press as saying, “If we got him, fine. If we didn’t, fine. We’re not out to make him a martyr.”

U.N. forces launched a series of attacks a week ago to punish Aidid and his men for the ambush of the Pakistanis, to disarm them and put an end to their anti-U.S. and anti-U.N. propaganda.

In the most aggressive of those actions, U.S. aerial gunships pounded Aidid’s headquarters, residence and suspected weapons caches in the neighborhood for more than four hours in the early morning Thursday. The airborne operation was followed up at daylight by house-to-house searches for Aidid.

Fierce fighting took place between U.N. ground troops and Aidid’s gunmen. U.N. officials revised the toll on their forces, saying four Moroccans were killed, and 46 other U.N. soldiers were injured. A Pakistani wounded in the June 5 ambush died of his injuries, they said.

Echoing comments President Clinton made at a press conference Thursday night, Howe said Thursday’s U.N. operation to destroy Aidid’s military power base was “totally successful.”

He added he was concerned that too much attention was being given to the problems in southern Mogadishu, which Aidid’s faction has long controlled.

“We’ve had a temporary setback in Mogadishu,” Howe admitted. “But there is an opportunity in this terrible crisis. This will allow us to accomplish one of our main tasks--disarmament. Only then can we return to the task of helping Somalis rebuild their country.”

“We will continue to look for hidden, clandestine arms caches,” he added. “There still are too many heavy weapons in the city being illegally kept.”

Although relief efforts continue in many parts of Somalia, the area of Mogadishu that has come under siege in the past week is an important staging area for aid agencies. Many agencies have offices in the region near Aidid’s headquarters and the nearby port is the conduit for thousands of tons of food destined for the provinces.

Efforts to feed 600,000 refugees in that region of Mogadishu have ground to a halt, with aid officials only now beginning to return to the capital.

U.N. military officials, reviewing Thursday’s offensive against Aidid’s headquarters and arms caches, acknowledged that at one point a fierce gun battle raged between their troops and snipers firing from a large and crowded hospital.

Moroccan and French troops fired on Digfer Hospital, the main medical facility in southern Mogadishu, after snipers began shooting from windows in the three-story building, the officials said.

“We directed fire only at rooms where the snipers were,” said U.S. Army Major David Stockwell, chief spokesman for the U.N. command. “We have respect for hospitals and we would have avoided it if he (Aidid) had treated it like a hospital. We consider it extraordinary that he would use this place to launch an attack.”

The hospital was deserted Friday, except for a few doctors and nurses who roamed its empty hallways. Only a few days before, it had been packed with the sick and injured, along with thousands of refugees from the fighting.

Calm returned to the city Friday as driving rains and the Muslim Sabbath kept Somalis off the streets for part of the day. U.S. helicopters dropped leaflets explaining Thursday’s events when the rain let up.

Military officials said they detained 143 Somalis on Thursday, and that 43 of them remained in custody for questioning Friday.

Aidid supporters in the streets around the warlord’s headquarters yelled and cursed at foreign journalists trying to inspect the damage inflicted by AC-130 Spectre gunships and Cobra helicopters.

A television sound technician for France’s TF1 television channel was shot and killed in an ambush. Jean-Claude Jumel, 50, had just arrived with other members of his television crew at Mogadishu’s airport and was driving into the city when gunmen attacked their vehicle.

Although U.N. forces had seized Aidid’s radio station a week earlier, his Somali National Alliance had continued to broadcast. On Friday, it claimed that Aidid’s forces had captured 12 Moroccan and two U.S. soldiers in Thursday’s fighting.

Lt. Col. Trevor Jones from the Australian contingent of the 18-nation U.N. Operation in Somalia denied that any U.N. soldiers were missing. “It is false,” he said of the SNA statement.

An SNA spokesman also said in Nairobi, Kenya, that 120 Somalis, mostly women and children, were killed Thursday. Hospitals confirmed at least 15 dead and 36 wounded. Hospital workers had said Thursday that more than 60 Somali civilians were killed and more than 100 injured.

Lt. Gen. Cevik Bir, the Turkish U.N. commander, said the operation “was planned with the intention of minimizing the threat to innocent Somalis and I think we accomplished our mission.”

Jones, the U.N. senior air staff officer, told reporters that most Somali casualties were SNA militiamen. Other U.N. officials acknowledged that some civilians were killed but declined to estimate the numbers. They blamed Aidid’s forces for using women and children as a shield for attacks on foreign troops.

But two aid agencies operating in Somalia were highly critical of the U.N. attacks. The Save the Children Fund, a British charity, said that in two vital areas, aid agency work and public confidence, “the U.N. action has been extremely damaging and has actually set back the course of progress in Somalia.”

And Gregoire Goodstein, logistics coordinator of a French aid agency, International Action Against Famine, whose compound was struck by an errant missile fired by a U.S. helicopter Thursday night, said, “I don’t think they needed anything that big. It doesn’t solve anything. It was a failure.”