Geneva: UN human rights investigators said on Monday they had received reports of shelling and arrests by Syrian forces since the ceasefire, as well as executions of some soldiers captured by rebels, although the level of violence generally was lower.
The team led by Brazilian expert Paulo Pinheiro said it hoped the truce brokered by international mediator Kofi Annan would hold and help put an end to gross human rights violations that it has documented over the past six months.
But the UN-backed commission of inquiry on Syria, whose mandate goes through to September, reiterated that the perpetrators of atrocities must face justice someday.
It acknowledged generally lower levels of violence in some areas of Syria, but voiced serious concern over accounts of a number of incidents since the truce took effect last Thursday.
These included the shelling of Khaldieh neighbourhood and other districts in Homs by government forces, and the use of heavy weapons in other areas, including Idlib and some suburbs of Damascus.
"The commission is also concerned by reports of new arrests, especially in Hama and Aleppo," it said, without giving details.
The team, which reports to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, has not been allowed into Syria. But it has interviewed hundreds of refugees and witnesses in the country and abroad, and examined videos, photographs and some government documents.
"The Commission also continued to receive reports of human rights abuses committed by anti-government armed groups engaged in fighting against the Syrian army during and after the ceasefire, including extra-judicial killings of soldiers captured during armed confrontations," it said.
A handful of soldiers in blue caps put a tentative UN presence at the heart of the Syrian crisis on Monday, predicting success for their mission to stabilise a shaky four-day-old ceasefire even as shells were still falling.
"WHOLE NEIGHBOURHOODS BOMBED"
Pinheiro and Karen AbuZayd, an American expert who formerly headed the UN agency aiding Palestinian refugees UNRWA, held talks with Annan last week. The panel's third member, Yakin Erturk, has dropped out but Pinheiro's team is aided by a dozen investigators and experts.
"People are being chased out from whole neighbourhoods rather than individually. There seems to be a new phase of how the military is behaving. Instead of people being targeted because of actions or for being in demonstrations, whole neighbourhoods are being bombed around the country," AbuZayd told Reuters in a telephone interview.
"Whole villages have been abandoned, nobody is there," she said.
AbuZayd, asked about alleged violations committed by rebels, said that this was something the investigators wanted to probe more closely, but needed access to the country. "We want to report, but need to be able to talk to victims," she said.
The team, which returns to the region soon, voiced dismay at what it called the "deteriorating humanitarian situation" in Syria where tens of thousands of civilians including women and children fled escalating fighting in the run-up to the truce.
The UN rights investigators, in their report issued on February 23, said that they had evidence that Syrian forces had committed crimes against humanity including murder, abductions and torture under orders from the "highest level" of army and government officials.
It drew up a secret list of suspects and handed it over in a sealed envelope to top UN human rights official Navi Pillay, who has said that the situation in Syria should be referred to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC).
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