The renewed government assault came a day after UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said he had received "grisly reports" that President Bashar Assad's troops were executing, imprisoning and torturing people in Syria's third largest city.

"In an act of pure revenge, Assad's army has been firing mortar rounds and ... machine guns since this morning at Jobar," said the Syrian Network for Human Rights, naming a neighborhood adjacent to Baba Amro, from which Free Syrian Army rebels pulled out this week after almost a month of siege and shelling.

"We have no immediate reports of casualties because of the difficulty of communications," it said in a statement.

Concern was mounting for civilians in freezing conditions in battered Baba Amro, where International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) trucks were still being held up by Assad's forces.

Anti-government activists said they feared troops were keeping out the ICRC to prevent aid workers witnessing a reported massacre of rebels in Baba Amro, which had become a symbol of a year-long uprising against Assad's repressive rule.

"The ICRC and Syrian Red Crescent are not yet in Baba Amro today. We are still in negotiations with authorities in order to enter Baba Amro. It is important that we enter today," ICRC spokesman Hicham Hassan told Reuters in Geneva.

A Damascus-based ICRC spokesman said Syrian authorities had given the convoy permission to enter but that government forces on the ground had stopped the trucks because of what they said were unsafe conditions, including "mines and booby traps".

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said Syria is committing a crime by refusing aid to civilians affected by months of conflict. "We must defend international values...while such atrocities continue," the Anatolia news agency quoted him as telling journalists in Istanbul. "The fact that aid is prevented and access is refused to United Nations officials constitutes another crime," he said.

Elsewhere in Syria, anti-Assad activists reported mass arrests and the killing of six soldiers, while the government's SANA news agency reported a suicide car bombing in the southern town of Deraa, a blast activists denied was a suicide attack.

In unusually tough remarks to the 193-member UN General Assembly on Friday, Ban explicitly blamed Damascus for the fate of civilians in the conflict. "The brutal fighting has trapped civilians in their homes, without food, heat or electricity or medical care, without any chance of evacuating the wounded or burying the dead. People have been reduced to melting snow for drinking water," he said. "This atrocious assault is all the more appalling for having been waged by the government itself, systematically attacking its own people."

Syrian UN Ambassador Bashar Jaafari said Ban's comments included "extremely virulent rhetoric which confines itself to slandering a government based on reports, opinions or hearsay."

Western diplomats yesterday received the bodies of American journalist Marie Colvin and French photographer Remi Ochlik, who were killed on Feb. 22 during a shelling of Baba Amro. A Reuters witness said the diplomats, believed to be the French ambassador to Syria and a representative from the Polish Embassy, which is managing US affairs in Syria, had taken the bodies from the Al-Assad University Hospital in Damascus.

The Paris prosecutor's office said it had opened a preliminary investigation for murder and attempted murder into the bombing that killed Ochlik and seriously wounded French reporter Edith Bouvier.

SANA said the bomber in Deraa killed two people and wounded 20 others, while residents said seven people had been killed. Rami Abdelrahman, head of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said anti-Assad fighters had killed six soldiers and wounded nine in the town of Al-Herak, south of Deraa.

In the Damascus suburb of Qudsiya, activists said hundreds of security forces personnel had arrested at least 30 people, destroyed vehicles and burned at least one home.

A fighter with the rebels, whose ranks include defectors from Assad's army, said they were planning their next steps after losing Baba Amro.

FROM: REUTERS