Armed men killed 68 people on Monday in a “massacre” in the rebel central province of Homs, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights head said.
“Sixty-eight civilians were killed today in the western countryside of Homs, in a rural area between the villages of Ram al-Enz and Ghajariyeh, and were taken to the state hospital in the city of Homs,” said Rami Abdel Rahman.
“The bodies bore signs of gunfire and knife wounds,” the head of the Britain-based monitoring group added.
According to Abdel Rahman, “the Observatory received information indicating that the victims were residents displaced from the city of Homs” which has been bombarded by regime forces for 24 straight days.
“They were killed by ‘shabiha’ (pro-regime gunmen),” according to the reports received by the Observatory, Rahman said. “But we cannot confirm or deny this information.”
The Observatory called for an independent investigation into the killings which the group labelled a “massacre”. The Local Coordination Committees, a network of activists, also reported a massacre in the Homs region.
A statement from the group said that “64 people who were trying to flee the bombardment in Baba Amr (district of the city of Homs) were killed at a security checkpoint in the Abel region of Homs.”
It was not immediately clear if the Observatory and LCC were referring to the same incident.
Meanwhile, efforts to evacuate foreign journalists from the rebel-held Baba Amr district of the flashpoint city of Homs failed on Monday, a Western diplomatic source said.
“The evacuation of journalists did not take place but three wounded Syrians were able to leave in Syrian Red Crescent ambulances,” the source said. A negotiator in the evacuation efforts said they fell through “at the last minute after ambulances had entered Baba Amr” but declined to specify if regime forces or rebels had blocked the operation.
An International Committee of the Red Cross spokesman in Geneva, meanwhile, said the ICRC and the Syrian Red Crescent were both operating in Homs. “The Syrian Red Crescent volunteers entered Baba Amr to carry out the evacuation of persons who needed it and to deliver medical assistance,” the spokesman said.
The diplomat in Damascus, speaking on condition of anonymity, told AFP earlier that talks and preparations were taking place to rescue two wounded Western reporters trapped in the besieged Baba Amr district.
“It is extremely delicate and the process could be blocked at any moment,” the diplomat said.
The ICRC has been negotiating to rescue the wounded Western journalists from Homs — under assault by regime forces for more than three weeks — and retrieve the bodies of two others killed there last week.
