Two Western journalists were more than a dozen people killed Wednesday as Syrian forces pounded the rebel city of Homs, activists said, while calls mounted for a truce to allow in humanitarian aid. The latest barrage came a day after security forces killed at least 68 people across Syria, adding to an overall death toll of 7,636 since March when anti-regime protests broke out, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. The toll includes 5,542 civilians, the head of the Britain-based rights monitoring group, Rami Abdel Rahman, told AFP. At least 13 more civilians were killed in shelling of the Baba Amr district of Homs early Wednesday, the 19th straight day that the city in central Syria was being pounded, the Observatory said.
American journalist Marie Colvin, who reported for London’s Sunday Times and French freelance photojournalist Remi Ochlik were killed in the bombing of Baba Amr, French Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand said. France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy said the deaths of the journalists showed that “this regime must go.” Activist Omar Shaker from inside Baba Amr told AFP that two were killed and three others wounded as a shell crashed into a makeshift media centre set up by anti-regime militants.
The French newspaper Le Figaro said one of its reporters, Edith Bouvier, was wounded in the legs. The area remained the target of random shelling, blocking attempts to remove the bodies, Shaker said. French television reporter Gilles Jacquier was killed in Homs last month as a shell exploded amid a group of journalists covering protests in the city on a visit organised by the Syrian authorities.
A Syrian citizen journalist, Rami al-Sayyed, who provided live footage on the Internet from Baba Amr, was killed late Tuesday when a rocket hit a car in which he was travelling, activist Hadi Abdullah told AFP. US State Department Spokesperson Victoria Nuland condemned the death of the two western journalists in a press conference, calling the Syrian government’s use of force “shameless brutality.”
