UN chief urges Syria to stop attacks as Assad releases 500 detainees

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has called on Syria to stop its attacks, saying U.N. observers monitoring the ceasefire were not there to watch the killings of innocent people.
 
Ban warned  that the massacres of civilians in Houla “could plunge Syria into a catastrophic civil war.”

Ban was speaking Thursday at a summit of the Alliance of Civilizations, a forum promoting understanding between the Western and Islamic worlds, days after more than 100 people were massacred in Syria's central Houla region.

In turn, Dmitry Peskov, President Vladimir Putin's spokesman, was quoted as saying by the ITAR-Tass news agency Wednesday that "there can be no talk" about a shift in Russia's stance on Syria under foreign pressure.

Meanwhile, the Syrian government has released 500 prisoners who were arrested on suspicion of involvement in the 14-month-old revolt, Syria's state media said on Thursday, two days after peace envoy Kofi Annan urged President Bashar al-Assad to free detainees.
   
The commander of Syria's main armed rebel group urged Kofi Annan on Thursday to formally announce that his seven-week-old ceasefire plan had failed, allowing rebels to resume attacks on President Bashar al-Assad's forces, Al Jazeera television reported.
   
Asaad also dismissed a 48-hour deadline declared on Wednesday by senior Free Syrian Army officer for Assad to comply with the plan.
   
"There is no deadline, but we want Kofi Annan to issue a declaration announcing the failure of this plan so that we would be free to carry out any military operation against the regime," Asaad told Al Jazeera, adding that the rebel forces had so far honoured their commitments to the plan.

Activists earlier reported that Syrian troops are shelling the central Houla area where more than 100 people were massacred last week.     

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and the Local Coordination Committees activist groups said Thursday's shelling of Houla was mostly by heavy machine guns.     

Both groups also said a young man was killed by sniper fire in Houla, a collection of poor farming villages in central Homs province.     

Survivors of the Houla massacre blamed pro-regime gunmen for at least some of the carnage that left 108 people dead, many of them children and women.     

The Syrian government denied its troops were behind the killings and blamed "armed terrorists."     

In the wake of the massacre, the United States, Western and Asian nations expelled Syrian diplomats inprotest.       

World powers share a belief that Syria could descend into civil war and plan to map out possible ways to avoid such a disaster for the region, a deputy to international envoy Kofi Annan said Wednesday.

AP/REUTERS