Children were among the wounded and doctors said three people were killed as police tried to put down political protests in Ethiopia.
State-run television, quoting federal police, said two people were killed on Thursday.
The renewed violence came a day after police shot dead at least 31 people and wounded dozens more, according to doctors who refused to give their names for fear of reprisals. The government has said that casualty figure was exaggerated and blamed its opposition for the violence.
Thursday's victims were shot at Old Airport, a wealthy neighborhood where many foreign expatriates live, according to doctors at the Black Lion and Zewditu hospitals. Sporadic gunfire was heard near the French and Dutch embassies.
Elsewhere in Addis Ababa, stone-throwing protesters had earlier defied a heavy military presence.
The wounded include a seven-year-old girl who lost an eye after police hit her with a baton. An 11-year-old boy, Yarad Wubetu, 11, was shot in the stomach when he came out of his home to watch police chasing a group of young men, said his mother, Lomi Bayia, a 33-year-old seamstress.
"I had told him not to leave the house, but he is a small boy and he was interested because of all the noise," she said.
Businesses were closed and taxis were off the streets.
The violence erupted over protests of May 15 elections that gave Prime Minister Zenawi Meles' Ethiopian Peoples Revolutionary Democratic Front control of nearly two-thirds of parliament. Opposition parties say the vote and counting were marred by fraud, intimidation and violence, and accuse the ruling party of rigging the elections.
The election had been seen as a test of Meles' commitment to reform. Meles has been lauded in the West as a new kind of African leader, appointed by British Prime Minister Tony Blair to his Commission for Africa to help draft a blueprint for ending poverty and building democracy. But at home his government has little tolerance for dissent and has been accused of severe human rights abuses.
Britain's minister for Africa, Lord Triesman, called for restraint from both sides and for an urgent, independent investigation into this week's violence.
The British ambassador in Addis Ababa called on the Ethiopian foreign minister and expressed serious concern over the arrest of opposition leaders and some civil society representatives and urged that all those not to be charged should be released immediately.
Western diplomats fear Ethiopia might be more likely to go to war again with longtime rival Eritrea as a way to rally domestic support. The diplomats, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they feared straining relations with the governments, said Eritrea, too, faced rising internal opposition and might welcome the distraction a war would cause.
Major General Rajender Singh, commander of UN peacekeepers monitoring the Ethiopia-Eritrea border, said on Thursday he feared a new war is possible after both sides moved troops and military hardware closer to the border in the past 10 days.
Singh's troops patrol a buffer zone set up after a two-year border war that ended in 2000. Ethiopia and Eritrea continue to dispute the border as it was marked out by an international commission following the war.
The protests began peacefully on Monday, when taxi drivers hooted their horns to show support for the opposition.
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