Wounded journalists leave Syria

Two wounded Western journalists escaped from Syria today after being trapped for days in the besieged central city of Homs, activist groups said.

Thirteen Syrian activists who were helping smuggle out at least one of the reporters were killed in the operation, one of the groups said.

The global activist group Avaaz said it helped smuggle British photographer Paul Conroy across the border into neighbouring Lebanon.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy said French journalist Edith Bouvier had also been evacuated, but it was not immediately clear how she got out and where she was taken.

“I’m glad that this nightmare is over,” Mr Sarkozy said.

The two were injured last week in a government rocket attack on the rebel-controlled district of Baba Amr in central Homs.

Two other Western journalists – American Marie Colvin and French photographer Remi Ochlik – were killed in the same attack. Their bodies and two other uninjured foreign reporters – Frenchman William Daniels and Spaniard Javier Espinosa – may still be in Homs.

The journalists’ harrowing ordeal shined a light on the horrors of life under siege in Homs, a stronghold for government opponents waging an uprising against President Bashar Assad’s authoritarian rule.

Hundreds have been killed in more than three weeks of relentless shelling of the city, many of them dying when they ventured out to forage for food as a humanitarian crisis grew more dire by the day.

A top UN official released a new death toll for the 11-month-old uprising, saying well over 7,500 people have been killed and the conflict looked increasingly like civil war.

Activist groups said yesterday that the death toll had surpassed 8,000.

Just days after Western and Arab nations met in Tunisia to forge a strategy on how to push Assad from power, Tunisia’s president said he was ready to offer asylum to the Syrian leader as part of a negotiated solution to the conflict. However the chances of Assad accepting such an offer are close to nil.

The UN human rights chief said the situation in Syria had deteriorated rapidly in recent weeks and demanded an immediate humanitarian ceasefire.

UN human rights chief Navi Pillay said her office had received reports that Syrian military and security forces “have launched massive campaigns of arrest” and launched an onslaught against government opponents that has deprived many civilians of food, water and medical supplies.

Ms Pillay told an urgent meeting of the UN Human Rights Council that “hundreds of people have reportedly been killed since the start of this latest assault in the beginning of February 2012”.

She called on Syria to end all fighting, allow international monitors to enter the country and give unhindered access to aid agencies.

Despite international pressure that mounts every day, the regime kept up its fierce bombardment of the central region. Activists reported overnight the deaths of 144 more people in unrest across the country – scores of them in Baba Amr by security forces as they tried to flee. They said at least nine more were killed by shelling today.

The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said shelling of the central town of Halfaya killed at least four civilians and wounded dozens, many of them seriously. The Syrian opposition group Local Coordination Committees said 20 people were killed and 100 wounded in the town. It put the day nationwide death toll so far at 64.

Both groups said Baba Amr was under intense shelling. The LCC said 24 people were killed in Homs.

Meanwhile, France’s Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said the country is working on a new UN Security Council resolution that would call for an immediate ceasefire in Syria and humanitarian aid.

Mr Juppe said: “I solemnly ask Russia and China not to block this new resolution.”

He said that shelling in Homs had reached “unbearable and criminal proportions”.

Russia and China have consistently blocked Security Council efforts to back Arab League plans aimed at ending the Syrian conflict.

Mr Juppe said the resolution “could stipulate an immediate ceasefire and access for humanitarian aid as well as renewing our support to the Arab League”.