Syrians sacrifice 13 lives to save journalists trapped in siege city

The global activist group Avaaz said it helped smuggle British photographer Paul Conroy across the border into neighbouring Lebanon.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy said French journalist Edith Bouvier had also been evacuated, but it was not immediately clear how she got out and where she was taken.

“I’m glad that this nightmare is over,” Mr Sarkozy said.

The two were injured last week in a government rocket attack on the rebel-controlled district of Baba Amr in central Homs. Two other Western journalists – American Marie Colvin and French photographer Remi Ochlik – were killed in the same attack.

Their bodies and two other uninjured foreign reporters – Frenchman William Daniels and Spaniard Javier Espinosa– may still be in Homs.

Homs is a stronghold for opponents of President Bashar Assad, who is backed by Russia and China.

Hundreds have been killed in more than three weeks of relentless shelling of the city, many of them dying when they ventured out to forage for food as a humanitarian crisis grows more dire by the day.

A top UN official says well over 7,500 people have been killed and the conflict looks increasingly like civil war.

Activists said yesterday that the death toll had surpassed 8,000.

Just days after Western and Arab nations met in Tunisia to forge a strategy on how to push Assad from power, Tunisia’s president said he was ready to offer asylum to the Syrian leader as part of a negotiated solution to the conflict.

However the chances of Assad accepting are close to nil.

The UN human rights chief said the situation in Syria had deteriorated rapidly in recent weeks and demanded an immediate humanitarian ceasefire. UN human rights chief Navi Pillay said her office had received reports that Syrian military and security forces “have launched massive campaigns of arrest” and launched an onslaught that has deprived civilians of food, water and medicine.

Ms Pillay told an urgent meeting of the UN Human Rights Council that “hundreds of people have reportedly been killed since the start of this latest assault in the beginning of February 2012”.

She called on Syria to end all fighting, allow international monitors to enter the country and give unhindered access for aid.

Despite international pressure that mounts every day, the regime kept up its fierce bombardment of the central region. Activists reported overnight the deaths of 144 more people – scores of them killed in Baba Amr by security forces as they tried to flee. They said at least nine more were killed by shelling today.

The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said shelling of the central town of Halfaya killed at least four civilians and wounded dozens.

The Syrian opposition group Local Coordination Committees said 20 people were killed and 100 wounded in the town. It put the day nationwide death toll so far at 64.

Meanwhile, France’s Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said the country is working on a new UN Security Council resolution that would call for an immediate ceasefire in Syria and aid.

Russia and China have consistently blocked efforts to end the Syrian conflict.