Armed men killed 68 people yesterday in a “massacre” in the rebel central province of Homs, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights head said.

Aleppo, rise up! Shake the presidential palace

“Sixty-eight civilians were killed today in the western countryside of Homs, in a rural area between the villages of Ram al-Enz and Ghajariyeh, and were taken to the state hospital in the city of Homs,” said Rami Abdel Rahman.

“The bodies bore signs of gunfire and knife wounds,” the head of the Britain-based monitoring group added.

According to Mr Abdel Rahman, “the Observatory re­ceived information indicating that the victims were residents displaced from the city of Homs” which has been bombarded by regime forces for 24 straight days.

“They were killed by ‘shabiha’ (pro-regime gunmen),” according to the reports received by the Observatory, Mr Abdel Rahman said. “But we cannot confirm or deny this information.”

The Observatory called for an independent investigation into the killings which the group labelled a “massacre”. The Local Coordination Committees, a network of activists, also reported a massacre in the Homs region.

A statement from the group said that “64 people who were trying to flee the bombardment in Baba Amr (district of the city of Homs) were killed at a security checkpoint in the Abel region of Homs.”

Meanwhile hundreds of students in Aleppo, Syria’s second city largely spared anti-regime protests and the ensuing crackdown, called yesterday for the city to join the revolt, monitors and activists said.

“Hundreds of students protested Monday against the regime at the University of Aleppo,” the country’s economic hub, said Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Protesters at the science and computer science faculties called for the “execution of president” Bashar al-Assad, according to activists calling themselves “the Union of Free Students in Syria,” contacted by AFP on Skype.

At the department of dentistry, a statue of former president Hafez al-Assad was demolished, they said.

“Aleppo, rise up! Shake the presidential palace,” chanted students at the faculty of civil engineering, according to a video posted online whose authenticity could not be confirmed.