Three intelligence officers have been killed in Damascus, a Syrian activist group said today.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the three were killed in the Barzeh district of the capital early today. It gave no further information and the Syrian government has not commented.
The 13-month-old Syria conflict has grown more militarised as rebels seeking to topple President Bashar Assad have ramped up attacks on military targets and security officers.
The UN says more than 9,000 people have been killed since the conflict began, most of them civilians.
The Observatory said 55 people were killed yesterday alone, most of them in a district of Hama following a visit by a UN monitoring team.
The United Nations said today that it aimed to deliver food assistance to 500,000 people in Syria "in the coming weeks", roughly double the number it expects to reach in April.
In a statement, the UN's World Food Programme (WFP) said that it was expanding its assistance at the request of the Syrian Arab Red Crescent and stood ready to increase its operations in the country further "when access permits".
UN aid agencies have been largely shut out of Syria but a joint assessment mission carried out last month with Syrian authorities estimated that at least one million people needed humanitarian aid.
The WFP has been helping 100,000 people a month in cities including Homs, Hama, Idlib and Damascus. It is "scaling up food assistance to reach a quarter million people by the end of this
month inside Syria with plans to double the
caseload to reach 500,000 people in the coming weeks", it said.
"As the conflict continues, Syrians in areas affected by the violence are struggling to feed their families and WFP is deeply concerned about the potential for food insecurity," said WFP Executive Director Ertharin Cousin.
More than 9,000 people have died in Syria in 13 months of fighting sparked by a popular uprising against president Bashar al-Assad. The UN security council approved on Saturday the deployment of up to 300 unarmed military observers to
monitor a shaky UN-backed truce implemented earlier this month.
Agencies