DAMASCUS (AFP) – Syrian security forces killed at least four people on Saturday in a border town, witnesses said, as the death toll rose in anti-regime protests despite a no-shoot order, dialogue offer and troop pullouts.
“The security forces, who had been encircling Tall Kalakh since the morning, fired machineguns. At least three people were killed and several were wounded” in the western town near the border with Lebanon, a witness said.
A hospital source across the border said a man named as Ali Basha, who was admitted to a Lebanese hospital earlier the same day after fleeing Syria with gunshot wounds, had died of his injuries.
More than 500 people, mostly women and children, fled across the border from Tall Kalakh on Saturday, town councillor Mahmoud Khazaal said.
Some of those who entered the area of Wadi Khaled in northern Lebanon suffered gunshot wounds, an AFP correspondent said, adding he saw two women and a man rushed away by ambulance.
Khazaal said intermittent gunfire could be heard across the border in Syria, and that refugees fleeing the violence reported security forces were “shooting and besieging Tall Kalakh”.
A witness in Tall Kalakh itself told AFP that residents were treating the wounded in a small clinic rather than the town hospital to prevent the casualties from being arrested or “finished off”.