A senior British journalist has claimed Syrian rebels tried to lead him and his team into a death trap so they would be killed by gunfire from government forces in a bid to discredit the Assad regime.
Alex Thomson, chief correspondent for Channel 4 News said the incident happened on Monday in the Syrian town of Qusair, about half an hour's drive from the battered city of Homs.
Thomson said he, his driver, a translator, and two other journalists were trying to return to government lines when their rebel escort led them down what he described as a dead-end in the middle of a "free-fire zone".
"Suddenly four men in a black car beckon us to follow. We move out behind," he recalls.
"We are led another route. Led in fact, straight into a free-fire zone. Told by the Free Syrian Army to follow a road that was blocked off in the middle of no-man's-land.
"At that point there was the crack of a bullet and one of the slower three-point turns I've experienced. We screamed off into the nearest side-street for cover.
"Another dead-end.
"There was no option but to drive back out onto the sniping ground and floor it back to the road we'd been led in on."
Thomson claimed that they were not led into no-man's-land by mistake.
"I'm quite clear the rebels deliberately set us up to be shot by the Syrian army," he wrote in a blog post on Channel 4's website
He said that their deaths at the hands of President Bashar al-Assad's forces would have drawn sympathy to the rebel cause. "Dead journos are bad for Damascus," he said.
Thomson said he and his colleagues eventually managed to get back to the government side. He has since left Syria.
His account was not possible to verify amid the chaos gripping Syria, but he insisted that there was no other explanation for what happened.
"They said: 'Go left.' Road was totally blocked 50 yards ahead. They had to have known."
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists calls Syria "the most dangerous place for journalists in the world," saying that it has recorded the deaths of nine local and international reporters there since November.
While Thompson was in Syria he was going "house to house" in Houla. Here are some transcripts of his courtesy of CNN
UNIDENTIIFED MALE: Shia and Alawites -- Shia and Alawites want to kill all Sunni people. Shia and Alawites, I promise you when the regime will fall we want to kill them.
THOMSON: You want to kill them?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: No. No. No.
THOMSON: No. No more killing. No more killing.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes. They kill us every day.
THOMSON: No more killing.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes.
THOMSON: You want to kill them?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes. I hurt them. And we all -- of all Houla people hurt them.
I could make some swarmy comment about the plot thickening, but I think this just speaks for itself and raises the moral conundrum of intervening in a civil conflict elsewhere.
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It has become clear to me in the previous days that any attempts at reconciliation and explanation with the community here has failed. I have tried my best. I really have. I pored my heart out trying. But it was all for nothing.
You win. There, I have said it.
Now there is only one thing left to do. Let us see if I can sum up the strength needed to end things once and for all.
I was initially a little surprised that they tried it. But I suppose the potential benefits of this were more than enough to outweigh the small amount of fallout from this.
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