Kenya's parliament has passed a bill allowing men to marry as many women as they want, prompting a furious backlash from female lawmakers who stormed out, reports said Friday.

The bill, which amended existing marriage legislation, was passed late on Thursday to formalize customary law about marrying more than one person.

Uganda warned Tuesday that Somalia's al-Qaida linked Shebab insurgents were planning to use fuel tankers as bombs, one day after Kenya thwarted a "massive" car bomb attack.

Both Uganda and Kenya are key contributors of troops to the African Union force fighting the Shebab in Somalia, and the Islamists have carried out major attacks in both countries in retaliation in the past.

Kenyan police said Monday they arrested two men who were driving a vehicle packed with explosives in the Indian Ocean resort city of Mombasa.

"We have not established where the target was, but we have detained two terror suspects who were in the vehicle," Henry Ondiek, from the Mombasa Criminal Investigation Department, said.

Kenya has deported three foreign men, accused of fighting alongside Somalia's Al-Qaida linked Shebab insurgents, to Belgium to face trial on terrorism charges, diplomatic sources said Friday.

The men, Belgian Mustapha Bouyabaren, Frenchman Rachid Benomari and Algerian Mohamed Said, were all jailed in July 2013 for a year for after pleading guilty to entering Kenya illegally.

Somali government forces backed by African Union troops captured a sixth settlement in the latest advance in their renewed offensive against al-Qaida-linked Shebab fighters, a spokesman said Friday.

Shebab gunmen are reported to have fled ahead of the assault on Thursday on the small town of Buula Burde, in the southern Hiran region bordering Ethiopia, Ali Houmed said, spokesman of the African Union's AMISOM force.

East African heads of state met in Addis Ababa Thursday in the latest push for peace in war-torn South Sudan, where almost three months of raging conflict has left thousands dead.

Leaders from the East African bloc, the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), were hosted by Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn to "deliberate on the current situation" in the troubled fledgling nation, a statement read.

Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta has announced he and his deputy William Ruto will be taking a 20-percent pay cut and ministers' salaries will be reduced by 10 percent in a bid to rein in the country's soaring public wage bill.

The pay cuts will take place "with immediate effect," Kenyatta said in a speech on Friday, adding that the current spending levels were unsustainable.

Islamist gunmen who shot dead scores of people in a Nairobi shopping mall last year were in apparent disagreement over whether they should kill women and small children, a court in Kenya heard on Thursday.

Witness Geoffrey Kotia, who was supervising children's activities in the upmarket shopping center, said he was shot by the attackers, accused of killing Somalis and mockingly told to telephone Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta for help.

A Kenyan court Wednesday dropped charges against 41 men and released on bail 29 others arrested earlier this month during a raid on a mosque accused of supporting Islamist extremists.

Police raided Mombasa's Musa mosque on February 2, detaining 70 men whom they accused of attending a radicalization meeting, sparking deadly riots in the port city.

Warring fighters in South Sudan have looted hospitals and murdered patients in their beds, cutting life-saving healthcare to hundreds of thousands of people, Doctors Without Borders said Wednesday.

Warning of an "alarming pattern of looting and attacks on patients" and health facilities, Doctors without Borders (MSF, Medecins sans Frontieres) said their crucial work was being strangled by a "climate of utter disrespect and fear."