A prominent Somali journalist who was a staunch critic of militant group Al-Shabaab was killed by a suicide bomber as he left a restaurant in the capital Mogadishu Saturday, officials and colleagues said.

Al-Shabaab claimed responsibility for the blast, which officials said killed Abdiaziz Mohamud Guled, the director of government-owned Radio Mogadishu.

The attack wounded two other people, a director at Somali National Television named as Sharmarke Mohamed Warsame and a driver.

"May God bless my brother Abdiaziz Mohamud Guled, he was a brave man the nation lost," Somalia's deputy information minister Abdirahman Yusuf Omar said in a statement.

Government official Ismael Mukhtar Omar, also a colleague of the dead man, told AFP that police had confirmed that the blast had been caused by a suicide bomber.

"He came out of the restaurant and went into his car with a colleague after they had dinner and the suicide bomber ran onto the car window and detonated himself," said another colleague Ali Mohamed.