Syria accused of new massacre as UN meets

BEIRUT/UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - U.N. monitors came under fire on Thursday as they tried to check reports of a massacre of at least 78 villagers by forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said.

Ban condemned the "unspeakable barbarity" of events in Mazraat al-Qubeir, while U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton again demanded that Assad cede power and leave the country.

Opposition activists said up to 40 women and children were among those killed in the Sunni Muslim village near Hama on Wednesday, posting film on the Internet of bloodied or charred bodies.

"There was smoke rising from the buildings and a horrible smell of human flesh burning," said a Mazraat al-Qubeir resident who told how he had watched Syrian troops and "shabbiha" gunmen attack his village as he hid in his family olive grove.

"It was like a ghost town," he told Reuters by telephone, asking not to be named because he feared for his safety.

"After the shabbiha and tanks left, the first thing I did was run to my house. It was burned. All seven people from my house were killed. I saw bodies on the stairs, the bathroom and bedroom. They were all burned," the witness said.

The latest killings, less than two weeks after 108 men, women and children were slain in the town of Houla, piles pressure on world powers to halt the carnage in Syria, but they have been paralyzed by rifts pitting Western and most Arab states against Assad's defenders in Russia, China and Iran.

Ban, addressing a special U.N. General Assembly session on the crisis, again urged Assad to implement international envoy Kofi Annan's six-point peace plan immediately.

He said U.N. monitors, in Syria to check compliance with a truce declared by Annan on April 12 but never implemented, had come under small-arms fire on their way to Mazraat al-Qubeir.

There was no mention of any of the monitors being injured.

The chief of the monitoring mission said earlier that Syrian troops and civilians had barred the team. "They are being stopped at Syrian army checkpoints and in some cases turned back," General Robert Mood said in a statement.

A report by Syria's pro-government Addounia TV that the team had reached Mazraat al-Qubeir could not be confirmed.

A Syrian official denied reports from the village, telling the state news agency that residents had asked security forces for help after "terrorists" killed nine women and children.

Assad, who has yet to comment, previously decried the Houla killings as "monstrous" and denied his forces were responsible.

Clinton described the latest reported massacre as unconscionable. "We are disgusted by what we are seeing (in Syria)," she told a news conference during a visit to Istanbul.

YEMEN-STYLE TRANSITION?

Clinton said the United States was willing to work with all U.N. Security Council members, including Russia, on a conference on Syria's political future, but made clear that Assad must go and his government replaced with a democratic one.

Annan, the U.N.-Arab League envoy for Syria, was due to brief the Security Council in New York later on Thursday.

A senior Russian diplomat said Moscow would accept a Yemen-style power transition in Syria if it were decided by the people, referring to a deal under which Yemeni leader Ali Abdullah Saleh stepped down in February after a year of unrest.

"The Yemen scenario was discussed by the Yemenis themselves. If this scenario is discussed by Syrians themselves and is adopted by them, we are not against it," Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov said, according to the Interfax news agency.

Video purportedly from Mazraat al-Qubeir showed the bodies of at least a dozen women and children wrapped in blankets or white shrouds, as well as the remains of burned corpses.

"These are the children of the Mazraat al-Qubeir massacre ... Look, you Arabs and Muslims, is this a terrorist?" asks the cameraman, focusing on a dead infant's face. "This woman was a shepherd, and this was a schoolgirl."

BURNED BEYOND RECOGNITION

A Hama-based activist using the name Abu Ghazi listed more than 50 names of victims, many from the al-Yateem family, but said some burned bodies could not be identified. The bodies of between 25 and 30 men were taken away by the killers, he said.

Shabbiha, drawn mostly from Assad's minority Alawite sect that is an offshoot of Shi'ite Islam, have been blamed for the killings of civilians from the Sunni Muslim majority. That has raised fears of an Iraq-style sectarian bloodbath and worsened tensions between Shi'ite Iran and mainly Sunni-led Arab states.

Events in Syria's 15-month-old uprising are difficult to verify due to tight state curbs on international media access.

U.N. diplomats said they expected Annan to present the Security Council with a new proposal to rescue his failing peace plan - a "contact group" of world powers and regional ones like Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar and Iran, which is an ally of Syria.

Rebel groups in Syria say they are no longer bound by Annan's truce plan and want foreign weapons and other support.

Western leaders, wary of new military engagements in the Muslim world, have offered sympathy but shown no appetite for taking on Assad's military, supplied by Russia and Iran.

Annan sees his proposed forum as a way to break a deadlock among the five permanent members of the Security Council, where Russia and China have twice vetoed resolutions critical of Syria that were backed by the United States, Britain and France.

It would seek to map out a political transition under which Assad would leave office ahead of free elections, envoys said.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Wednesday proposed an international meeting on Syria that would include the prime candidates for Annan's proposed contact group, including Iran.

Clinton, however, reacted coolly to that idea, accusing Iran of "stage-managing" Syria's repression of its opponents in which the United Nations says more than 10,000 people have been killed.

German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said it was important to involve Russia in peace efforts on Syria, saying the conflict there could ignite a regional conflagration.

"Assad's regime must know there is no protective hand over these atrocities," he said in Istanbul on Thursday.

Leaders of a bloc grouping China, Russia and Central Asian states called for dialogue to resolve the Syria conflict, rather than any firmer action by the Security Council.

France said it would host a conference of the "Friends of Syria" - countries hostile to Assad - on July 6.

(Additional reporting by Dominic Evans and Oliver Holmes in Beirut, Khaled Yacoub Oweis in Amman, Steve Gutterman in Moscow, Arshad Mohammed in Istanbul and Balazs Koranyi, Gleb Bryanski and Chris Buckley; Writing by Alistair Lyon; Editing by Michael Roddy)

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