Syrian FM urges foreign journalists to respect rules

Syrian Foreign Ministry spokesman Jihad Makdissi on Thursday urged foreign journalists to respect regulations in Syria and avoid illegally sneaking into the country, a day after two foreign journalists were reportedly killed in restive Homs province.

In a statement carried by state-run SANA News Agency, Makdissi said foreign journalists should respect all laws regulating the work of journalists in Syria and avoid violating the law by illegally entering Syrian territories and reaching unsecured and troubled places.

In a separate development, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said on Thursday that China will not attend the Friends of Syria conference Friday in Tunisia.

On Wednesday, two foreign journalists were killed when a bomb hit a media center in the Syrian city of Homs.

After the journalists' death, Syrian Information Minister Adnan Mahmoud said he was not aware of their presence in Syria and urged journalists who had entered the country illegally to "go to the nearest center ... to regularize their status".

Meanwhile, Makdissi said that respecting Syrian law would allow visiting journalists to get facilities and recommendations from the Information Ministry over the situation on the ground, adding that the ministry was exerting all-out efforts and had granted licenses to around 200 media delegations over the past two months.

The spokesman said the ministry offered its condolences to the families of the journalists who were killed in Syrian, while rejecting statements that held Syria responsible for the death of journalists who sneaked into the country without notifying the authorities.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy described the deaths of the two journalists, French photographer Remi Ochlik and American Marie Colvin of Britain's Sunday Times, as an assassination, and said the Assad era had to end.

"That's enough now," Sarkozy said. "This regime must go, and there is no reason that Syrians don't have the right to live their lives and choose their destiny freely."

France and Britain demanded that three other Western journalists wounded in the strike on a house in Homs be given urgent medical care.

French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said a Syrian army cease-fire to give rapid access to humanitarian aid was "imperative", adding that the Syrian government's response to the attacks on the journalists was insufficient.