Ban Ki-moon increases pressure on Syria

UN SECRETARY General Ban Ki-moon has expressed deep frustration with the violence in Syria, two days after reports emerged of another massacre.Mr Ban said there was little evidence that Syria’s government was complying with envoy Kofi Annan’s peace plan.Activists say government-backed militias killed 78 people in Qubair village on Wednesday. The government said terrorists killed nine people.UN observers are expected to try to reach the village later.They were shot at and forced to turn back while trying to reach Qubair on Thursday.The BBC’s Jim Muir in neighbouring Lebanon says the need for the observers to find out what actually happened at Qubair is made all the more acute by the fact that there are two completely contradictory accounts of what happened.Syrian state TV is repeatedly showing pictures of dead children, accusing the opposition of staging the killings of nine people to spark international intervention.But opposition activists are equally adamant that a much larger massacre was perpetrated by militias known as shabiha.The activists say government forces removed many of the bodies while the UN observers were trying to get to the village.Western media organisations are restricted in Syria, making it difficult to verify the claims of either side.Syrians ‘bleeding’“The danger of a full-scale war is imminent and real,” Mr Ban told a joint news conference with Mr Annan and Arab League Secretary General Nabil al-Arabi.“Reports of yet another massacre in Qubair underscore the horrifying reality on the ground,” he said.“How many more times have we to condemn them, and how many ways must we say that we are outraged? The Syrian people are bleeding.”And while reiterating that Mr Annan’s six-point peace plan remained “at the centre of our focus”, he said urgent talks were needed to discuss how to proceed further.The US is demanding decisive action, but Russia and China are both opposing any outside intervention.