They carried out arrests and set fire to homes, activists reported, at the end of Ramadan during which a rights group said 473 people were killed.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 16 people were arrested in Houle, 20 km from Homs, where the authorities sparked anger on Monday as they returned the bodies of 13 people arrested in early August.

The Local Coordination Committees, grouping activists on the ground, said security forces set fire to the homes of two men in Houle and threatened to arrest their wives and children if they did not surrender.

In the village of Aqrab, security forces burned down another house and carried out searches and arrests, terrorizing local residents, according to the committees.

They said that in Hama province, central Syria, opposition figure Mustafa Rostom was arrested from his home by military intelligence agents who prevented him from taking medicines with him although he has health problems.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared on Wednesday that the actions of Assad had caused “irreparable” damage to his legitimacy.

In his annual address to France’s top diplomats, Sarkozy said France would do whatever is “legally” within its power in order to ensure a victory of Syria’s pro-democracy movement.

“The regime in Damascus wrongly believes it is safe from its own people,” Sarkozy said.

“What the Syrian president has done is irreparable. France, with its partners, will do all that is legally possible in order that the Libyan people’s hopes for freedom and democracy are triumphant.”

Meanwhile, Romania’s foreign minister says his country has plans to evacuate some of the 15,000 Romanians who live in Syria.

Amnesty International said it believed that at least 88 people, 10 of them children, have died in detention in Syria during the past five months. Some of the victims were as young as 13, it said. “These deaths behind bars are reaching massive proportions, and appear to be an extension of the same brutal disdain for life that we are seeing daily on the streets of Syria,” said Neil Sammonds, Amnesty International’s researcher on Syria.