Syrian forces bombarded parts of the shattered city of Homs anew today and blocked the Red Cross aid meant for civilians stranded for weeks without food and fuel in the former rebel stronghold.
The renewed government assault came a day after UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon said he had received "grisly reports" that Syrian president Bashar al-Assad's troops were executing, imprisoning and torturing people in the city.
"In an act of pure revenge, Assad's army has been firing mortar rounds and ... machine guns since this morning at Jobar," said the Syrian Network for Human Rights, naming a neighbourhood adjacent to Baba Amro, from which Free Syrian Army rebels pulled out this week after almost a month of siege and shelling.
"We have no immediate reports of casualties because of the difficulty of communications," it said in a statement.
Concern was mounting for civilians in freezing conditions in battered Baba Amro, where International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) trucks were still being held up by Assad forces.
Anti-government activists said they feared troops were keeping out the ICRC to prevent aid workers witnessing a reported massacre of rebels in Baba Amro, which had become a symbol of a year-long uprising against Dr Assad's repressive rule.
"The ICRC and Syrian Red Crescent are not yet in Baba Amro today. We are still in negotiations with authorities in order to enter Baba Amro. It is important that we enter today," ICRC spokesman Hicham Hassan told Reuters in Geneva.
A Damascus-based ICRC spokesman said Syrian authorities had given the convoy permission to enter but that government forces on the ground had stopped the trucks because of what they said were unsafe conditions, including "mines and booby traps".
"There has been fighting there for at least a month. The situation cannot be good. They will need food, it's cold, they will need blankets. And there are injured there that need to be evacuated immediately," Saleh Dabbakeh said.
Elsewhere in Syria, anti-Assad activists reported mass arrests and the killing of six soldiers, while the government's Sanaa news agency reported a suicide car bombing in the southern town of Deraa, a blast activists denied was a suicide attack.
Syrian state television conducted interviews with unnamed civilians in what it said was Baba Amro, against a backdrop of empty streets, some with heavy conflict damage.
"Anyone who went out on the street was kidnapped or slaughtered. We called for the army to come in. God bless the army, they saved us from the armed terrorist gangs," said one interviewee, referring to the Free Syrian Army rebels.
In unusually tough remarks to the 193-member UN General Assembly last night, Mr Ban explicitly blamed Damascus for the fate of civilians in the conflict.
"The brutal fighting has trapped civilians in their homes, without food, heat or electricity or medical care, without any chance of evacuating the wounded or burying the dead. People have been reduced to melting snow for drinking water," he said. "This atrocious assault is all the more appalling for having been waged by the government itself, systematically attacking its own people."
Syrian UN ambassador Bashar Ja'afari, said Mr Ban's comments included "extremely virulent rhetoric which confines itself to slandering a government based on reports, opinions or hearsay."
Russia and China twice vetoed council resolutions that would have condemned Damascus and demanded it halt the crackdown on anti-Assad demonstrators, accusing Western and Arab nations of pushing for Libya-style "regime change" in Syria.
Wounded British photographer Paul Conroy, who escaped Homs earlier this week, said yesterday he had witnessed Syrian troops carrying out a massacre in heavily-shelled Baba Amro.
"I've worked in many war zones - I've never seen or been in shelling like this," the Sunday Times photographer said from a hospital bed in central London.
"I'm an ex-artillery gunner so I can kind of follow the patterns - they are systematically moving through neighbourhoods with munitions that are used for battlefields. It's not a war, it's a massacre, an indiscriminate massacre of men, woman and children."
Western diplomats on Saturday received the bodies of American journalist Marie Colvin and French photographer Remi Ochlik, who were killed on February 22nd during a shelling of Baba Amro.
The diplomats, believed to be the French ambassador to Syria and a representative from the Polish embassy, which is managing US affairs in Syria, took the bodies from the Al-Assad University Hospital in Damascus.
Today’s bombing in Daraa marked the first time a suicide bombing struck an opposition stronghold. Daraa is the birthplace of the nearly year-old uprising against Dr Assad. The revolt has killed more than 7,500 people, according to most recent UN estimates.
Syria's government said in December that "armed terrorists" had killed more than 2,000 soldiers and police during the unrest.
Agencies