UN observers said on Wednesday 13 bodies had been discovered bound and shot in eastern Syria, days after a massacre of 108 civilians, nearly half of them children, ignited a world outcry. Syrian activists said the victims were army defectors killed by President Bashar al-Assad's forces, but it was not possible to verify their accounts.
Outrage at last Friday's mass killings in the Syrian town of Houla, documented by UN monitors, prompted a host of Western countries to step up pressure on Syria on Tuesday by expelling its senior diplomats, and to press Russia and China to allow tougher action by the UN Security Council.
Wednesday's UN observer report underlined how a peace plan drafted by UN-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan has failed to stem bloodshed or bring Syria's government and opposition to the negotiating table. Annan's deputy Jean-Marie Guehenno told the Security Council that Syria's protesters "have lost fear and are unlikely to stop their movement", according to a diplomat with knowledge of the closed session.
Guehenno said direct engagement between government and opposition was "impossible at the moment" and expressed "serious doubts over the commitment of Syrian authorities to the Annan plan", the diplomat said. Major-General Robert Mood, the Norwegian head of the observer mission, said the corpses found in Assukar, about 50 km (31 miles) east of the city of Deir al-Zor, had their hands tied behind their backs and signs that some had been shot in the head from close range.
Video footage posted by activists shows the bodies face down on the ground, hands tied behind their backs, with dark pools of what could be blood around their heads and torsos. Mood did not apportion any blame for the killings. UN peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous said in New York on Tuesday that the Syrian army and "shabbiha" militiamen supporting Assad were "probably" responsible for massacring 108 people in Houla with artillery, tanks, small arms and knives. Syria denied any responsibility and blamed Islamist "terrorists" - its term for rebel forces.
Assad has so far proved impervious to international scolding and Western sanctions for his crackdown on peaceful demonstrators and armed insurgents, and has failed to return troops and tanks to barracks as required by the Annan plan. However, the UN observers sent in to monitor a notional cease-fire were able to verify the horrors in Houla, producing a wave of world revulsion hard for Moscow and Beijing to ignore.
But China and Russia have stuck to their rejection of any intervention or UN-backed penalties to force Assad to change course, while backing Annan's peace drive, the only broadly accepted initiative to halt the bloodletting in Syria. Asked if Western and Arab countries were pressing Moscow to change its position, President Vladimir Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Reuters: "Russia is a country with a consistent foreign policy and any pressure is hardly appropriate."
The West is itself averse to military intervention, although French President Francois Hollande said on Tuesday that this could change if the UN Security Council backed it - something that is not possible unless veto-wielding members Russia and China allow it. Turkey joined other countries including the United States, Britain, France and Germany in expelling Syrian diplomats in protest at the Houla massacre, saying unspecified international "measures" would follow if crimes against humanity continued.