(Adds eyewitness accounts) By Guled Mohamed MOGADISHU, Aug 14 (Reuters) - Heavy fighting between Somali government forces backed by Ethiopian troops and insurgents in Mogadishu has killed at least 31 Somalis and wounded 60 in the past 24 hours, a human rights group said on Tuesday. "The killings were from gunshots and explosions in different parts of the city," the head of Elman Human Rights Group, Sudani Ali Ahmed, told Reuters. "It is totally unacceptable and ... against human rights." In one incident, Ethiopian soldiers opened fire on a bus full of civilians, killing 10 people and wounding several others, Ahmed said. "This was the most ugly attack," Ahmed said. "Six people died instantly and another 14 were wounded, four of whom died." Ethiopia denied carrying out the bus attack. "This is a baseless accusation, as usual," Ethiopian Information Ministry spokesman Zemedhun Tekle said in Addis Ababa. "We would never open fire on civilians like this." A European Union security expert and U.N. arms monitors have both said Ethiopia carried out attacks on civilian targets in past anti-insurgent offensives in Mogadishu. At a hospital near the scene of the attack, Deq Hayr Olad, 24, said he remembered the bus being sprayed with bullets, some of which hit him in the left leg. "My wife was eight months pregnant," he told Reuters, his leg swathed in bandages. "They both died." A Reuters reporter at the hospital saw wounded people streaming into the emergency room. In the hallway, a boy wafted a freshly taken X-ray of his uncle's bullet wound in the air to dry it. Felis Adan, an 8-year-old survivor of the bus attack, cried as she sat next to her wounded grandmother on a stretcher. "I don't know what happened," she told Reuters. "I saw people crying and screaming, then my grandmother was bleeding." As the violence in Mogadishu intensified, Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi told Reuters on Tuesday he was seeking to create a Baghdad-style "Green Zone" in the city to protect officials and foreign visitors from insurgent attacks. Hundreds have been killed by mortar and rocket attacks and firefights in Mogadishu since Somalia's Ethiopian-backed interim government ousted Islamist fighters in December, sparking an insurgency that has forced hundreds of thousands to flee. (Additional reporting by Tsegaye Tadesse in Addis Ababa)
