Peace envoy Kofi Annan condemned the killing of at least 108 people in the Syrian town of Houla as «an appalling crime» today and urged President Bashar al-Assad to prove he wants a peaceful resolution to the crisis racking his country.
Assad’s forces killed at least 41 people in an artillery assault on the city of Hama, activists said, shortly after the UN Security Council condemned the massacre in nearby Houla which took place on Friday.
With international criticism growing of Assad’s methods in trying to crush a 14-month-old uprising, now accompanied by a lightly armed insurgency, UN/Arab League envoy Annan arrived in Damascus for talks on his faltering peace plan.
He explicitly urged the Syrian government to «take bold steps to signal that it is serious in its intention to resolve this crisis peacefully» before adding: «This message of peace is not only for the government, but for everyone with a gun.»
UN monitors say at least 108 people were killed, among them dozens of children. Many of the victims were also hacked to death or shot at close range, as shown in graphic images distributed by activists.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told the Security Council that these killings could have been the work of rebels or government forces who moved in after the bombardment.
«We are dealing with a situation in which both sides evidently had a hand in the deaths of innocent people,» Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said at a news conference with visiting British Foreign Secretary William Hague.
buenosairesherald.com