The death toll in Syria has risen to more than 2,900 since pro-democracy protests began in March, according to the latest figures issued by the United Nations human rights office.
"Based on our detailed list of individual names that we have been keeping, the total number of people killed in Syria since protests began now stands at more than 2,900," Rupert Colville, spokesman for UN high commissioner for human rights Navi Pillay, said yesterday.
The United Nations' previous death toll was 2,700 from the crackdown by the government of president Bashar al-Assad, which generally denies reports of human rights abuses and says it has no choice but to restore law and order.
Mr Colville noted that the latest figure did not include those who have disappeared and whose fate is unknown.
In the latest violence, Syrian forces crossed into Lebanon and shot dead a Syrian man in the eastern Bekaa Valley, security sources said today.
They said the shooting occurred yesteday near the village of Arslan, where Syrian forces made a similar incursion two days earlier.
The frontier between the two countries is poorly delineated in some of the remote border areas, which are havens for smugglers bringing subsidised Syrian goods into Lebanon or arms across into Syria.
Lebanon's army did not comment on the incident.
The UN Human Rights Council is to review Syria's record today, part of its regular examination of all UN member states. The United States and other Western countries are expected to denounce what they say are atrocities by Syria.
The Geneva forum last month launched an international commission of inquiry into alleged crimes against humanity which a preliminary UN investigation said were being perpetrated by Syrian security forces.
Sergio Pinheiro, a Brazilian heading the new three-member investigation, was to meet a high-level Syrian delegation in Geneva this week to seek permission to enter the country. The team, which plans to gather testimony in the region, is due to issue a report by the end of November.
Radwan Ziadeh, an exiled Syrian activist, said yesterday that more than 30,000 Syrians had been imprisoned since protests began, many in schools or soccer fields converted into detention centres.
"Mass killings continue," he told a discussion on torture in Syria. "Detention centres are a nightmare for Syrians now."
His businessman brother Yassin and four other members of his family are among those being detained, Mr Ziadeh said. His Damascus Centre for Human Rights Studies had documented the deaths of 183 children at the hands of Syrian forces, many under torture, as well as 18 cases of rape in Homs, he said.
Child of Syria, a film produced by the centre and shown for the first time in Geneva, told the tale of Thamer al Sharei, a 15-year-old boy from the southern city of Deraa who disappeared during demonstrations on April 29th.
His parents, interviewed after fleeing to Jordan, said they retrieved his battered body from a morgue, riddled with 11 bullet holes and a drill hole in his cheek, two months later. "If it were not for the childhood scar on his forehead, I never would have recognised him," his father Mohammed says in the film. "They have taken torture to a new level. If they are doing this to children, what are they doing to grown-ups?"
Ibrahim al-Jahaman, identified as a former detainee at Bab Touma prison near Damascus at the time, says in the film: "I think he was in a semi-conscious state, I'm not sure he felt the blows he was getting."
Mr Ziadeh said Syrian forces felt immune from any accountability. He voiced dismay at the UN Security Council's failure to condemn Syria, after China and Russia vetoed a European-drafted resolution on Tuesday. It was important for the Security Council to ask the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate crimes by Syrian forces, he said.
Reuters