Soldiers backing Ivory Coast's rogue leader Laurent Gbagbo have again opened fire on civilians, killing at least four people hours after hundreds took to the streets to protest against the shooting dead of seven women at a march last week.

The bodies of three men and one woman were seen by an Associated Press photographer inside a clinic where they were taken for treatment. The overwhelmed clinic had nowhere to put them except for the floor.

A women's march in the Treichville neighbourhood of Abidjan had ended when security forces rushed into the area and began shooting. Earlier on Tuesday, hundreds of demonstrators had gathered in the Abobo suburb near the bloodstained pavement where at least the unarmed women were killed last Thursday.

Mariam Bamba, 32, picked up a tree branch next to one of the bloodstains. "This leaf is all that they were carrying when they were killed," she said.

A video obtained by the Associated Press captures the minutes before the attack on Thursday. In the footage, which was also posted on YouTube, the crowd scatters as screaming is heard. The cameraman pans over the collapsed bodies of at least four women. Another woman tries to stand up but collapses.

Many of the organisers of the Abobo demonstration stayed home on Tuesday fearing reprisals by security forces. But hundreds of others took to the streets on International Women's Day to express their disgust at the Gbagbo regime.

He has refused to cede power, even though the country's election commission declared the opposition leader, Alassane Ouattara, the winner of the 28 November poll. Nearly 400 people have been killed, most of them civilians who voted for Ouattara.

The violence against the all-women march last week prompted an international outcry. Britain's minister for Africa, Henry Bellingham, called it "a deplorable and cowardly act against unarmed protesters, calling for the results of the presidential elections to be respected". The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton said: "Gbagbo and his forces have shown a callous disregard for human life".

More than 200,000 people have fled Abobo, the local UN peacekeeping mission reported, after Gbagbo's security forces entered the suburb and began shelling it with mortars. Fighting has also broken out in western Ivory Coast, where rebels allied with Ouattara have seized control of a 30-mile corridor along the border with Liberia.

Hopes linger for a negotiated solution, even after a high-level African Union panel of five presidents extended its timeline for mediation by a month. Previous attempts to intervene have failed after Gbagbo rejected offers of amnesty, exile and teaching positions in the US.