Time for peace plan short says Hague after fresh Syria atrocity

Syrian opposition groups say scores died in the latest massacre on Wednesday in the central Hama province but the exact death toll and circumstances are impossible to confirm. The UK-based Observatory for Human Rights said “dozens” were killed overnight in Mazraat al-Qubair on the outskirts of Hama, including many women and children.

United Nations monitors were shot at while trying to get to the scene yesterday. The unarmed observers were initially denied access before they were fired upon by small arms. There were no reports of casualties.

Last night Mr Hague said the peace plan brokered by former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan had “clearly failed so far”, and called for more action by Russia and China to press President Bashar Assad’s regime to end the violence.

“Time is not yet at an end, it’s clearly running out,” he said. “Violence on both sides is escalating and the situation is rapidly deteriorating.

“This latest atrocity is another example of the escalating horror and murder in Syria”.

International envoy Mr Annan has urged the United Nations to unite behind efforts to end the conflict and called for “consequences” if his peace plan is not implemented.

Mr Annan told the UN General Assembly the time has come to determine what more can be done and urged the international community to take their unity to a new level and “genuinely unite behind one process and act and speak with one voice”

Mr Hague said: “The Annan plan won’t last indefinitely. Syria is clearly on the edge of deeper violence, of deep, sectarian violence, village against village, pro-government militias against opposition areas and of looking more like Bosnia in the 1990s than of Libya last year.

“The Annan plan has clearly failed so far but it is not dead, all hope for it is not lost.”

Russia had “important leverage” over the Syrian regime, he added.

Earlier, Prime Minister David Cameron called for concerted action by the international community against the Assad regime.

Speaking in Oslo, he said: “It really is appalling, what is happening in that country, and I want to see concerted action from the international community.”

Syria’s main opposition group in exile, the Syrian National Council (SNC) said 78 people were killed, 35 of whom were from the same family and more than half were women and children.

It claimed the militiamen converged on Qubair from neighbouring pro-regime villages and that some of the dead were killed execution-style, while others were attacked with knives.

Amateur video posted online purported to show the bodies of babies, children and two women wrapped in blankets and lined with frozen bottles of water to slow the decomposition of their corpses.

Another row of bodies lay elsewhere: a grandmother, a mother, and five siblings and two cousins, according to the narrator, all wrapped in white sheets, more frozen bottles tucked between them.

One toddler’s arm covered her face. Their names were scrawled on pieces of paper and tucked into their shrouds.

In another video, the camera pans over to four blackened, charred objects too disfigured to be identified as human. The narrator said they were of a mother and two children shelled in their home.

The violence comes on the heels of a horrific massacre in late May in Houla, a cluster of villages in central Homs province, which left more than 100 dead including children and women gunned down in their homes.

Syria denied the reports of a new massacre as “absolutely baseless”, blaming “an armed terrorist group” and claiming the death toll was nine women and children.

UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon said each day in Syria sees more “grim atrocities” and for many months it has been evident that president Bashar Assad and his government “have lost all legitimacy”.