At least one person died and two others were injured in the Somali capital Mogadishu on Sunday when a car exploded near a camp for displaced people, police said.

"We believe it was a suicide car bomb. Its driver detonated the bomb in his car," police officer Ibrahim Elmi told Reuters.

The blast was in Mogadishu's Bondeere district, near a site where hundreds of people displaced by fighting elsewhere in the anarchic country are being temporarily sheltered.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility but the al Shabaab militant group has carried out a series of deadly attacks in Somalia.