More than 80 people have been killed in Mogadishu in the past 24 hours during some of the heaviest clashes in months between Somali Islamist insurgents and government troops, a human rights organisation said.
Both sides exchanged heavy fire early today, with health workers in various hospitals saying they were treating scores of patients wounded in the fighting.
"Eighty-one people were killed and 119 were wounded in the violence in Mogadishu since Saturday," Sudan Ali Ahmed, chairman of the Elman Peace and Human Rights Organisation, said.
He said he had collated the death toll from local hospitals, undercover activists counting bodies in the street and families. There was no independent verification of the death toll, but residents had reported escalating clashes since yesterday.
Residents said the two sides had strengthened their positions overnight and exchanged heavy fire in the early hours this morning around the Save Our Souls (SOS) Hospital.
"A mortar shell landed on a house just behind SOS hospital, killing an old man and seriously wounding his wife and her 3 children," said a medical worker who declined to be named. "As we were running to help this family we saw an unidentified dead man lying on the ground."
One witness said he saw the bodies of four men near the main livestock market, adding that no one had dared to take the bodies away "because the whole place is under Ethiopian siege."
The fighting was fiercest in the Islamist stronghold of northern Mogadishu where the government and its Ethiopian allies are trying to flush out the remnants of a sharia courts movement ousted from the capital at the end of 2006.
Prime Minister Nur Hassan Hussein expressed regret for Somalis forced to flee the violence but said his interim government and its Ethiopian allies had the right to self-defence.
"I am very sorry for the poor civilians who evacuate when fighting takes place," he told a news conference. "The government of Somalia is always ready for peace, but if our troops and Ethiopian troops are attacked, fighting with any group that is against peace will be inevitable."