KAMPALA, Jan 31 (Reuters) - Uganda could raise the number of peacekeepers in Somalia to 8,000, a figure long planned by the African Union but never delivered by its members, President Yoweri Museveni said in a statement on Thursday.

Museveni met with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon on Wednesday on the sidelines of an AU summit in Ethiopia. Ban expressed concern that few AU countries had fulfilled pledges to contribute to the force, the Ugandan statement said.

"Let me discuss it with the High Command first. I will inform you, but we are capable of raising this number (of 8,000)", Museveni was quoted as telling Ban.

Burundi has sent around 600 troops in the past few months, bolstering an original Ugandan force of 1,600 that had been in place since early 2007.

The AU has struggled to get other nations to deploy soldiers in a country plagued by daily shootouts and mortar battles between Islamist insurgents, various warlords and Ethiopian-backed Somali government forces.

In the latest unrest, insurgents fired mortars at a police station on Thursday and men armed with pistols killed the Mogadishu mayor's spokesman, Abbas Galeyr, who replaced a predecessor killed in a similar attack in December.

"They shot him in the head while he was shopping in Hamarweyni market," Abdi Fitah Shaaweye, the mayor's assistant for security affairs, told Reuters.

The U.N. refugee agency this week described Somalia's conflict -- which has uprooted more than a million people -- as the world's most pressing humanitarian crisis, even worse than Sudan's war-shattered Darfur region. (Additional reporting by Aweys Yusuf in Mogadishu; Writing by Tim Cocks; Editing by Nick Tattersall and Michael Winfrey)

AlertNet news is provided by