Ban Urges Syria Humanitarian Access, Slain Journalists Bodies on Way to Capital

U.N. leader Ban Ki-moon on Friday demanded that Syria unconditionally let in humanitarian aid and said the government was "afraid" to let in the U.N. emergency aid chief into the country, as an aid convoy was denied access to the battered Baba Amr district of Homs.

"The Syrian authorities must open without any preconditions to humanitarian communities," Ban said.

Speaking as reports emerged of Red Cross convoys being kept out of the protest city of Homs, Ban said the images coming out of Syria were "atrocious."

"It is totally unacceptable, intolerable. How as a human being can you bear with this situation," Ban told a press briefing at the U.N. headquarters.

Syria has refused to let U.N. humanitarian chief Valerie Amos into the country but Ban said the United Nations still hoped to persuade President Bashar al-Assad to let her in to make an aid assessment.

"Why are they afraid of receiving the head of U.N. humanitarian department? We are ready to mobilize on this, we do not have access. So that is priority number one at this time," he said.

International Red Cross chief Jakob Kellenberger called the Syrian refusal to let aid in after an earlier assurance "unacceptable."

The joint convoy of the ICRC and Syrian Red Crescent team had spent all day outside the area waiting to be allowed to respond to the humanitarian needs of the people there, Kellenberger said, after the Syrian authorities gave the green light on Thursday.

Also on Friday, the red cross said the remains of two Western journalists killed in Syria, American reporter Marie Colvin and French photographer Remi Ochlik, were being taken from the besieged city of Homs to the capital.

"Ambulances are currently transporting the bodies of Marie Colvin and Remi Ochlik towards Damascus," International Committee of the Red Cross spokesman in the capital Saleh Dabbakeh said.

Colvin, 56, worked for Britain's Sunday Times and 28-year-old Ochlik was in Syria for the photo agency he co-founded, IP3 Press. They were killed when a makeshift press center in the rebel-held Homs district of Baba Amr was hit on February 22.

Three other Western journalists were wounded in the attack, including Colvin's British photographer colleague Paul Conroy and French reporter Edith Bouvier of Le Figaro and French photographer William Daniels.

A plane transporting Bouvier and Daniels landed in Paris later Friday after they were evacuated from Homs where they had been trapped for days under regime bombardment.

Conroy was taken to Britain's embassy in the Lebanese capital Beirut after he was smuggled out of Homs, British Prime Minister David Cameron said on Wednesday.

Paris prosecutors on Friday opened a preliminary murder probe into the attack on the media center.

A judicial source said that one of the inquiry's first objectives would be to gather data that would allow the formal identification of Ochlik's body so it could be returned to France.