More than 80 die in Mogadishu fighting - rights group

By Abdi Sheikh and Aweys Yusuf

MOGADISHU (Reuters) - Somali Islamist insurgents and government troops exchanged mortar fire on Sunday and a prominent human rights group said 81 people had been killed in the past 24 hours in some of the heaviest clashes in months.

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.

"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, told Reuters by telephone.

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 Saturday.

"We condemn the unceasing fighting and the use of artillery on the civilian population," Ahmed said. "We also condemn the opposition groups who fight among the civilians and use them as (human) shields."

His group estimates that 6,500 people were killed last year in Somalia's conflict and 1.5 million uprooted from their homes.

The interim administration is struggling to contain a deepening Islamist-led insurgency involving near-daily attacks on allied Somali-Ethiopian troops.