Syria's interior ministry has denied the existence of a mass grave in the southern town of Daraa, which the army had raided to put down anti-regime protests, SANA news agency said Tuesday.
"This information is totally false," an interior ministry official told the state news agency, adding that the reports were part of a "campaign of incitement" against Syria.
A rights activist told AFP on Monday that a mass grave had been disccovered in the old town of Daraa, at the heart of protests roiling the country for two months and virtually shut off from the outside world.
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"The army (Monday) allowed residents to venture outside their homes for two hours a day," said Ammar Qurabi, of the National Organisation for Human Rights in Syria.
"They discovered a mass grave in the old part of town but authorities immediately cordoned off the area to prevent residents from recovering the bodies, some of which they promised would be handed over later," he said by telephone. Video obtained by Al Jazeera purports to show the grave.
Strikes called for
Syria's opposition called for a general strike Wednesday in defiance of a government campaign to crush pro-democracy protests, as the army pressed its siege of the restive town of Tall Kalakh, the latest target of its brutal crackdown.
"Wednesday will be a day of general strike in Syria," said a statement posted on the Facebook page of the Syrian Revolution 2011, an Internet-based opposition group that has been a motor of protests that erupted two months ago.
"It will be a day of punishment for the regime by the revolutionaries and the people of free will," it added.
"Let's transform this Wednesday into a Friday (the regular day for protests), with mass protests, no schools, no universities, no stores or restaurants open and even no taxis."
The strike call came amid reports of corpses and dozens of wounded left lying in the streets of the western town of Tall Kalakh where the army is now concentrating its crackdown.
"It looks like a ghost town here, I can see a corpse lying at the entrance of the town and there are dozens of wounded that we cannot evacuate," said a Sunni Muslim local resident early Tuesday, reached by telephone.
"This is a massacre," he added, his voice charged with emotion. "We never expected them to be so brutal.
"They are pushing for sectarian strife."
Syria's minority Alawites, an off-shoot of Shiite Islam, form the backbone of the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. The majority of the country's 22-million population are Sunni Muslims.
Shooting in Homs
Also Tuesday, a resident of the northern city of Homs, which has been besieged by the army, said shelling and shooting was heard late into the night in the city's Deir Baalba neighbourhood.
"This is all in response to the demonstrations taking place every day and which are quickly put down by security forces," said the resident who spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing for his security.
"There are hundreds of tanks deployed in the area and security forces are checking IDs and searching vehicles thoroughly," he added.
His account and that of the Tall Kalakh resident could not be independently verified as journalists are not allowed to travel freely in Syria to report on the unrest.
The official state news agency said two police officers were killed and four wounded on Monday in Deir Baalba when their car came under fire by an "armed terrorist gang".
