A BRITISH JOURNALIST who was smuggled out of Homs after being wounded in a rocket attack has said the Syrian regime is undertaking an “indiscriminate massacre” of its own citizens.

Paul Conroy called for international intervention to help the Syrians trapped in troubled areas, saying the country could face atrocities of the scale seen in Rwanda and Srebrenica, Bosnia during the 1990s.

“It’s not a war, it’s a massacre,” he told Sky News. “An indiscriminate massacre of men, women and children.”

Conroy was wounded in the same attack that killed Sunday Times reporter Marie Colvin and French photographer Remi Ochlik. Watch him being interviewed here:

YouTube/telegraphtv

His comments came after UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon accused President Bashar al-Assad’s regime of waging an “atrocious assault” against its own people. Ban called for aid workers to be allowed access to the worst-hit areas, and “an immediate end to the killings and violence”.

He said government forces had tortured, imprisoned and summarily executed civilians after taking over the Homs suburb of Baba Amr, where rebel fighters had held out for weeks against a brutal siege.

The Red Cross was yesterday refused access to Baba Amr.

This morning, a suicide bomber detonated his car in the southern city of Deraa, killing several people according to Syrian state media. The city has been a centre of the uprising for the past year.

- Additional reporting from AP