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Conflicting Claims On Cause And Death Toll After Explosion In Syria

While activists inside Syria say government forces are responsible for an explosion today in the city of Hama, and that about 70 people were killed, President Bashar Assad's regime has a much different story. It says about 16 people were killed by an explosion at a bomb factory used by "armed terrorist groups," the BBC reports.

According to al-Jazeera: "The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a U.K.-based rights group, said that it was not sure what had caused the explosion, and it asked U.N. monitors in the area to investigate."

The U.N. estimates that more than 10,000 people, most of them civilians, have died in Syria over the 13 months since anti-Assad regime protests began.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Mark Memmott is NPR's supervising senior editor for Standards & Practices. In that role, he's a resource for NPR's journalists – helping them raise the right questions as they do their work and uphold the organization's standards.

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