UN: Most of 108 Killed in Syria Were Executed
The U.N.’s human rights office on Tuesday added grim new details about the massacre of more than 100 people in a rural area in Syria last week, saying that most of the dead were shot at close range, some of them women and children killed in their homes.
The brutality of the Houla killings, documented in gruesome amateur videos of scores of bodies laid out before burial, sparked widespread international outrage and raised new questions about the ability of an international plan to end 15-months of violence in Syria.
The U.N. said that at least 108 people, including 34 women and 49 children, were killed in an attack that began on Friday and continued through the night on Houla, a group of poor farming villages northwest of the central Syrian city of Homs.
On Tuesday, spokesman Rupert Colville of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights said U.N. monitors who visited the area found that fewer than 20 of the dead were killed by artillery fire. The rest appeared to have been shot at close range.