More than 300 people were killed when troops loyal to Syrian President Bashar-al-Assad stormed into a town named Darya, located just out side of Damascus on Saturday, media reports and opposition activists said. The death toll brings the number of people killed in Syria in 24 hours to 450.
“Bodies were found strewn in basements, streets and in residential buildings”, activists said. Electricity and telecommunication services were cut off and the massacre was carried out after troops cordoned off the entire town. “Many had been killed by snipers and some were killed in execution style”, the activists claimed. On Saturday alone the total number of killed in the fighting was more than 450 in Syria. 120 people have been killed in other small towns closer to Aleppo where heavy hand-to-hand fighting is raging.

“In the last hour, 122 bodies were discovered and it appears that two dozen died from sniper fire and the rest were summarily executed by gunshots from close range,” Reuters reported.
The activist said he witnessed the death of an 8-year-old girl, Asma Abu al-Laban, shot by army snipers while she was in a car with her parents.

“They were trying to flee the army raids. Three bullets hit her in the back and her parents brought her to a makeshift hospital. Nothing could be done for her,” he said.
The Local Coordination Committees, an activists’ organization, said Assad’s forces killed 440 people across Syria on Saturday, including dozens of women and children, in one of the highest death tolls since the uprising against his rule broke out in March last year.

The organization, which monitors Assad’s military crackdown, said 310 people were killed in Damascus and its environs, including Daraya, 40 in the northern province of Aleppo and 28 in Syria’s Sunni tribal heartland region of Deir al-Zor.
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