Syria Offers Amnesty to Rebels, Calls on Refugees to Return Home

Syria's government on Thursday offered an amnesty to opposition gunmen without "blood on their hands," urging them to surrender as a U.N.-backed ceasefire entered into force.

"The interior ministry calls on gunmen whose hands have not been stained with Syrian blood to hand themselves in, along with their weapons, at the nearest police center. They would be released and all legal procedures against them would be terminated," it said, quoted by state television.

Syria also urged tens of thousands of displaced people who took refuge inside or outside the country due to violence to return home.

"The interior ministry calls on brother citizens, who were forced to flee their homes, whether to areas within the country or to neighboring states, to return home, and ignore propaganda and misleading news," it said in a statement carried by state television.

Some 25,000 Syrians have fled to Turkey.

In Jordan, the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR has registered between 5,000 to 8,000 Syrians, but the kingdom's foreign minister Nasser Judeh said more than 90,000 Syrians have sought refuge in the country.

In Lebanon, there are around 16,000 Syrian refugees, according to the UNHCR.

The number of internally displaced people is not available.

Calm prevailed in Syria on Thursday after Damascus said it would halt military operations against rebels at daybreak, on the day set by the U.N.-Arab League peace envoy Kofi Annan as a deadline to implement a ceasefire aimed at ending 13 months of bloodshed.

Meanwhile, state media reported that a "terrorist" attack killed a Syrian army officer and wounded 24 other people in second-largest city Aleppo on Thursday, accusing rebels of seeking to "torpedo" the U.N.-backed peace plan.

"An armed terrorist group used an explosive device to target a bus transporting officers and non-commissioned officers to their unit in Aleppo. It killed a lieutenant colonel and wounded 24 other people" at 8:00 am (0500 GMT), the official SANA news agency reported.

State television said the armed groups were "intensifying criminal operations in an attempt to destablize Syria and torpedo the plan" of international peace envoy Kofi Annan, which went into effect at 6:00 am (0300 GMT).

The head of Aleppo military hospital, Brigadier Osama Qashqash said that three of the wounded were in serious conditions, SANA reported.

The government mouthpiece posted a picture of damage to the front of a civilian bus.