UN monitors arrive in Syria's Haffeh, Syria Contact Group to meet on June 30

Major Powers are working towards holding a crisis meeting on Syria in Geneva on June 30 to try to get a tattered peace plan back on track, diplomats said on Thursday.    

Kofi Annan, the United Nations-Arab League mediator, has called for convening the Contact Group as soon as possible but there has been U.S. opposition to Iran's involvement.

A United Nations observer convoy has arrived Thursday in the Syrian town of Haffeh, a U.N. spokeswoman said, two days after the monitors were forced to turn back from the site of recent clashes due to attacks by angry residents.    

"Our observers entered al-Haffeh," spokeswoman Sausan Ghosheh said in an email. International envoy Kofi Annan said on Monday he was worried residents were trapped in Haffeh, while the United States said it feared a "potential massacre" was under way.    

Syria's state-run news agency earlier said a car bomb has exploded in a suburb of the capital Damascus, wounding at least two people.       
 
It was not immediately clear what the target of Thursday's blast was. SANA says the car bomb detonated in a parking lot near the Imam Sadr Hospital in Sayyida Zainab, a Damascus suburb that is home to a Shiite Muslim shrine popular with Iranian and other Shiite pilgrims.            

It says the bomb caused substantial material damage. At least two people were wounded.

Accordingly, Syrian government forces are killing civilians in organized attacks on towns and villages that amount to crimes against humanity, Amnesty International said on Thursday, citing evidence from over 20 locations in the country's northwest.    

Amnesty said the report provided "further evidence that deliberate and unlawful killings are part of a widespread and systematic attack against the civilian population, carried out in an organized manner and as part of state policy, and therefore amount to crimes against humanity."    

In turn, China's Foreign Ministry said on Thursday that it does not approve of excessive reliance on pressure or sanctions to address the crisis in Syria and reiterated its support for U.N. envoy Kofi Annan's mediation efforts.

For his part, the Syrian ambassador to Moscow said on Thursday that Russia is not supplying Syria's government with attack helicopters.    

"Russia is not delivering any helicopters to Syria," Ambassador Riad Haddad told Reuters, speaking two days after U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the United States had information that attack helicopters were on the way from Russia to Syria.