Tuesday, April 10, 2007
MOGADISHU (Reuters) - Recent clashes pitting Ethiopian and Somali forces against clan militia and insurgents killed at least 1,086 people and wounded more than 4,300, according to a local committee set up to assess the damage.
The committee's report obtained by Reuters on Tuesday said 1.4 million people fled their homes in the Somali capital because of the March 29-April 1 battles.
A previous report by a local human rights group put the death toll at 381 people, in what aid workers have said was the worst fighting in Mogadishu for more than 15 years.
Fighting subsided after a truce was negotiated between elders from the dominant Hawiye clan and the Ethiopian army deployed in Somalia to support the interim government.
Colonel Hussein Siayaad, a member of the committee which groups security officials and civil society activists, said his team had recovered 88 bodies from one square kilometre (0.4 sq miles) of land, noting that it represented only a fraction of the battlefield.
"This is a rough estimate and the number is going to be much higher because we have not ventured out of the main roads," Siayaad told Reuters.
"The dead bodies are still there and it will take weeks to collect all of them."
Source: Reuters, April 10, 2007