By Luke Baker

LONDON, Oct 16 (Reuters) - Hassan Adde suspected it was time to leave Somalia when someone threw a hand grenade at him in the street.

The 37-year-old father of five, a journalist with the independent Somali radio station HornAfrik, escaped serious injury in the Mogadishu attack. But the warning was clear in a city that Somali journalists reckon is as dangerous as Baghdad.

So when two of his colleagues at HornAfrik were killed on the same day four weeks later, he upped and fled to Kenya.

"I was getting threatening calls from both sides. They all wanted to kill me," Adde told Reuters as he sat in a cafe in London, where he recently moved to seek political asylum.

"If I reported something the government did, the government would threaten me. If I reported something the insurgents did, the insurgents would threaten me. I couldn't work at all. There was nothing I could do."

As the rain falls outside, and red London buses pass by, Adde looks a long way from Mogadishu, but it is very much on his mind -- his wife and children remain at a refugee camp outside the city, some of the tens of thousands to have fled fighting.

So far this year, seven journalists have been killed in Somalia and twice as many have fled the country as forces loyal to the government, including Ethiopian military allies, battled it out with Islamist-led insurgents.

Both sides appear particularly to fear the work of independent journalists and groups such as HornAfrik, an influential media company set up in 1999 by a Somali businessman who returned from exile in Canada.

In mid-August, a popular talk show host on one of HornAfrik's radio stations was shot four times at close range as he turned up for work in the morning, and the same afternoon a co-founder of the media group was killed in a car bomb attack which also wounded a Reuters journalist.

"LIKE BAGHDAD"

Even before those assassinations, journalists were being constantly harassed and badgered, either by the shaky interim government, the Islamists or by violent war lords, all hoping to muzzle them or dictate what they should report.

Abdulkadir Nadara, a presenter on Universal TV, a privately owned channel, was detained along with a reporter and a cameraman in April on the orders of a presidential spokesman.

They were held for 46 days, during which time they were threatened and ordered to work on behalf of the government, before being released without charge following pressure from groups such as Reporters Without Borders.

On Tuesday, Reporters Without Borders ranked Somalia 159th out of 169 countries for its lack of press freedom.

After his release, Nadara received more threats to his life, this time from Islamist insurgents, until he decided to flee, heading first to Nairobi and then to London. His two wives and nine children remain at one of the camps outside Mogadishu.

"The threats are there and they are very real," said Nadara, who has been described as the Larry King of Somalia.

"As long as they remain, I cannot go back. It is too dangerous," he added, fingering his mobile phone nervously.

Nadara and Adde have no hesitation in describing Mogadishu as more dangerous now than it was even in 1991, when war lords overran the city and much of the country, reducing it to near-anarchy and driving out U.S. troops who came to try to restore order in late 1992.

Next to Baghdad, they believe, it is the most dangerous city in the world. But more than the pure danger of living there, and the fear that if they returned they could be killed, what worries them most is that the story is not getting out.

"Soon everyone who has any ability to tell the Somalia story will have left. Then the world will definitely never know," says Nadara, looking out intensely from behind super-thick glasses.

Alongside him, Adde shakes his head and stares at the rain. "Somalia's future looks very dark," he says. "A lot of people will die and it could go on for a very long time."

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