UN monitors shown bodies after dozens slain in Houla
The Associated Press
Posted: May 27, 2012 5:57 AM ET
Last Updated: May 27, 2012 6:01 AM ET
The deaths in Syria of over 90 people, including at least 32 children, has sparked international outrage and raised fears that the international peace plan is in tatters.
More than a dozen amateur videos posted online on Saturday gave glimpses of the carnage in the Houla area of central Syria.
One video is said to show UN monitors being shown the shrouded corpses of those killed, laid out in rows inside what appeared to be a mosque.
Members of the Syrian Free Army speak to a person believed to be a member of the United Nations observer mission in Syria, near bodies in Houla on Saturday. (Houla News Network/Reuters)
The assault on Houla, northwest of the central city of Homs, was one of the bloodiest single events in Syria's 14-month-old uprising.
British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, in an interview broadcast Sunday,said the "scenes of savagery" are "just revolting, stomach-churning."
Clegg told the BBC's Andrew Marr those responsible for human rights crimes will be barred from entering Britain.
Activists said Syria's regime forces peppered residential areas of Houla with mortars after large demonstrations on Friday.
That evening, they said, pro-regime fighters known as shabiha stormed villages, gunning down men in the streets and stabbing women and children in their homes.
UN observers, among more than 250 who were dispatched in recent weeks to salvage the ceasefire plan, found spent artillery tank shells at the site Saturday.
UN officials confirmed the shells were fired at residential neighbourhoods.
The Syrian government blamed the attack on "armed terrorist groups" but provided no details or death toll.
The Houla villages are Sunni Muslim.
The forces came from an arc of nearby villages populated by Alawites, members of the offshoot of Shiite Islam to which Assad belongs, the activists said.
The activists said the killings appeared to be sectarian between the two groups, raising fears that Syria's uprising, which started in March 2011, is edging closer to the type of war that tore apart the country's eastern neighbour, Iraq.
The bloodshed is yet another blow to the international peace plan brokered by envoy Kofi Annan and cast a pall over his coming visit to check on its progress.
The ceasefire between forces loyal to the regime of President Bashar Assad and rebels seeking to topple it was supposed to start on 12 April but has never really taken hold, with new killings every day. The UN put the death toll weeks ago at more than nine-thousand. Hundreds have been killed since then.
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