MOGADISHU (AFP) — Residents in the war-battered Somali capital on Wednesday found six more bodies, four of which belonged to clerics after vicious weekend battles killed more than 60 people.
The bodies were found in a garage in a northern Mogadishu district, where Ethiopian forces backing Somali government troops clashed with Islamist fighters over the weekend, the residents said.
"I cannot explain the brutal killing that Ethiopian forces committed here," said Fadumo Abdulahi, a sister to one of the slain clerics.
"They dragged my brother ... my husband and two other men from the house and shot them in the head inside a garage near my house," she told AFP.
The death toll from the clashes, some of the worst in Mogadishu in two months, now stands at 63, including 13 clerics.
"We are in shock," said Nadifo Moalim, the widow of a senior cleric, whose body was also found in the garage.
"They took him with three others from his house the day of the heavy fighting," she said. "I thought they arrested him until I saw his decomposing body in a nearby garage."
The bodies of two civilians were also discovered near a cinema hall in the neighbourhood.
In Geneva, the United Nations' independent human rights expert for Somalia on Wednesday denounced the killing of civilians and called for an immediate ceasefire by the two sides.
Ethiopian troops came to the rescue of Somalia's embattled transitional government in late 2006 to oust an Islamist militia which had taken control of large parts of the restive Horn of Africa country.
Islamist fighters have since waged a guerrilla war against the government, their Ethiopian allies and African Union peacekeepers, with civilians often caught in the ensuing crossfire.
Somalia has been rocked by seemingly endless fighting since the 1991 ouster of president Mohamed Siad Barre.
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