Syrian government forces summarily executed 12 civilians on their way home from work in a fertiliser factory in Qusayr, activists in the central town told AFP by telephone on Friday.The reported killings late on Thursday afternoon came on the eve of a special session of the UN Human Rights Council called to discuss the conflict.
"The workers were on a bus when they were forced to stop at a checkpoint on the outskirts of Qusayr," in central Homs province, said Salim Kabbani of the Local Coordination Committees, which organise protests on the ground.
"Regime forces tied their hands behind their backs and shot them."
Kabbani said abuses had become routine in Qusayr, a town southwest of the flashpoint city of Homs.
"The checkpoint where the workers were killed is dangerous, and people are often tortured there."
Several areas of Qusayr have been under non-stop shelling by government forces, Kabbani said.
"We have a very high number of maimed, and we fear many of them will die because we don't have the medical materials we need to treat them."
Amateur video posted on YouTube by activists showed bodies lain out side by side, several with bullet wounds to the head.
The footage, purportedly shot when rebel fighters reached the scene to recover the bodies, included the voice of one man crying out: "This is my son, my son," as he tugged in vain at the leg of a corpse lying face up, his blue shirt and white trousers covered in blood.
Another video posted on Friday showed hundreds of people in Qusayr taking to the streets for a joint funeral for the slain workers.
A man bearing the Syrian independence flag led the cortege. Crowds chanted: "Oh God, we only have you to turn to," and: "We won't surrender, we won't surrender."
Green branches were laid on the white shrouds wrapped over the corpses as they were carried by pallbearers through the town.
The opposition Syrian National Council (SNC) accused the regime of carrying out the "slaughter" and called for international intervention to stop killings in Syria.
"The world and international institutions are responsible for protecting people from genocide and must intervene immediately to prevent regime thugs from completing their massacres and continuing to kill innocent people," the SNC said in a statement.
It called on the UN Security Council and the Arab League
...an organization of Arabic-speaking states with 22 member countries and four observers. The League tries to achieve Arab consensus on issues, which usually leaves them doing nothing but a bit of grimacing and mustache cursing...
to take "courageous decisions" against the regime to halt its crackdown and protect the Syrian people.
For its part, the Britannia-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said it had asked the UN military observer mission in Syria to visit Qusayr as soon as possible to investigate the latest killings.
Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP that the persistent bloodshed made a mockery of the UN-backed ceasefire that was supposed to take effect from April 12.