Syria said it freed 1,180 detainees involved in protests who are “without blood on their hands,” as the Arab League prepared for crisis talks about Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s eight-month crackdown on dissent.
The violence escalated this week, with as many as 90 people killed across Syria on Monday, including 34 soldiers who were ambushed by military defectors, Mahmoud Merei, head of the Arab Organization for Human Rights, said yesterday by telephone from Cairo.
The announcement on Tuesday of the releases came amid signs of mounting pressure on Assad from the Arab world and beyond, including calls for him to quit.
Photo: Reuters
To mark the Muslim observance of Eid al-Adha, which started on Nov. 6, Syria had already freed 553 other detainees “not involved in the events,” the state-run Syrian Arab News Agency said.
The Arab League’s representatives planned to gather yesterday in Morocco to discuss possible measures to influence Assad.
The group suspended Syria’s membership on Saturday as the government continued its assaults after agreeing on Nov. 2 to the league’s plan for ending the bloodshed.
The Cairo-based League said Syria would be barred from meetings until it withdraws tanks from cities, releases detained protesters and starts supervised talks with the opposition. It called on all Arab countries to withdraw ambassadors, and said it plans economic and political sanctions.
A group of activists and opposition figures met with Arab League Secretary-General Nabil el-Arabi in Cairo yesterday, Merei said.
“We want to stress in our meeting that we are against foreign military intervention as well as a no-fly zone,” Merei said.
“We don’t want a repeat of what happened in Libya in our country,” he said. “We want change, for the regime to go, however we want to preserve our army and limit the bloodshed.”
Turkey suspended joint oil and gas exploration in Syria on Tuesday, a day after the EU widened its sanctions and Jordan’s King Abdullah said Assad should step down.
Meanwhile, the government pledged there would be no more attacks on foreign embassies by Assad loyalists angry at his regime’s growing isolation, the Jordanian foreign ministry said yesterday.
During a meeting with Arab ambassadors in Damascus on Tuesday, Syrian foreign ministry No. 2 Faisal Mikdad “promised that such incidents will not be repeated against accredited embassies in Syria,” ministry spokesman Mohamad Kayed told Jordan’s official Petra news agency.
“The Syrian government apologized to Jordan for the attack against the Jordanian embassy in Damascus during which demonstrators tore down the Jordanian flag,” Kayed added.
Monday evening’s incursion into the Jordanian embassy compound came after Abdullah became the first Arab leader to say openly that he thought Assad should step down.
Other missions targeted have included those of Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, all outspoken critics of the Assad regime’s eight-month crackdown on dissent that the UN says has cost more then 3,500 lives.
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