According to witnesses and doctors reports on Friday, heavy fighting between insurgents and Ethiopian troops backing Somalia's shaky government has killed more than 40 people and wounded 50 others in the past 24 hours.

Ethiopian troops based at the former defense ministry in the south of the capital killed eight civilians early Friday when they fired tank shells into the main Bakara market, Khalif Haji Muse told The Associated Press, adding that two others died when Ethiopian snipers fired at them.

The bodies of 34 people, among them four women and six Ethiopians, were found in the northern and southern parts of Mogadishu, where fighting was intense a day earlier, witnesses said.The presidential spokesman said insurgents would be treated harshly.

Their aim, spokesman Hussein Mohamed Mohamud said, "is to depict the fighting as a war between Ethiopians and Somali people. Far from it."

The Thursday afternoon fighting was sparked when Ethiopian troops tried to retrieve the body of one of their soldiers who was killed in earlier skirmishes in the south of the city and dragged through the streets of the capital, witnesses said.

Ethiopian troops based at the former prisons guard building in the south fired several tank shells into the north of the city, hitting the livestock market, which is seen as a hotbed of supporters of Islamic insurgents battling the Somali government and their Ethiopian allies, said local resident Abdiaziz Mohamed Guled.

On Thursday, hundreds of protesters, mainly women and children, chanting anti-Ethiopian slogans dragged the body of an Ethiopian soldier left behind by his fleeing colleagues.