Reports: Syrian Women Among Several Arrested in Homs

Syrian security forces on Saturday arrested several civilians, including women, in the flashpoint central city of Homs where gunfire was also heard, activists told Agence France Presse.

"Gunshots were heard in al-Khalidiyeh neighborhood and security forces have been making arrests," Abdel Karim Rihawi, the head of the Syrian League for the Defense of Human Rights, said by telephone.

Another activist, Rami Abdel Rahman of the London-based Syrian Observatory of Human Rights, spoke of a "campaign of arrests in Homs that has targeted several women."

"Six explosions were heard on Friday night near the Baba Amr neighborhood" in Homs, Syria's third city, he said.

Security forces also made arrests on Saturday in the Damascus neighborhood of Rukneddin, which has a mostly Kurdish population, Rihawi said.

On Friday, troops and security forces barricaded Rukneddin and the Qabun district of Damascus and conducted house-to-house searches, activists had said.

Meanwhile a 12-year-old boy who was shot in the head earlier this month by a policeman as he took part in an anti-regime rally in Jober, near Damascus, died on Saturday of his injuries.

Talhat Dalat was shot from 25 meters away, said the Syrian Organization of Human Rights. Activists said he would be buried later on Saturday.

Human rights groups say that the government's crackdown on four months of dissent has killed than 1,480 civilians, while more than 12,000 have been arrested and thousands forced to flee.

France and Britain have condemned the Syrian government's crackdown on dissent, particularly in Homs.

More than 50 people have been killed since Saturday in central Homs, activists say, accusing the regime of sowing sectarian strife among the city's Christians, Sunni Muslims and President Bashar Assad's Alawite minority community.

Troops earlier this week arrested "armed men" and seized "stockpiles of weapons," the pro-government al-Watan newspaper reported on Wednesday.

On Friday more than 1.2 million protesters swarmed cities in the north and east of the country in support of Homs, where 25,000 people also rallied, activists have said.

Security forces and pro-regime agents used force to disperse protests across Syria on Friday, killing eight people, two of them in Homs, they said.

In a statement late on Friday, U.N.. officials said Syrian security forces may have committed crimes against humanity in their crackdown on four months of anti-regime protests.