Syria's Homs under curfew after couple's murder raises sectarian tensions

The killing of a husband and wife from a Bedouin tribe in Syria’s Homs province on Sunday triggered renewed sectarian tensions.

The bodies were found at their home in the town of Zaidal, "with signs that the wife had been burned", state-run news agency SANA reported, adding that “sectarian slogans were also found at the crime scene".

The husband appeared to have been stoned to death, a source told The New Arab's Arabic-language sister site, Al-Araby Al-Jadeed. 

“This attack appears to have the goal of fueling sectarian divisions and undermining stability in the region,” Maj. Gen. Murhaf al-Nassan, head of internal security in Homs, said in a statement.

Security forces managed to regain control of the area and imposed an overnight curfew, after Bedouin tribes carried out retaliatory attacks on the city's southern neighbourhoods. The two deceased were from the Bani Khaled tribe.

Syria’s Interior Ministry in a statement urged citizens to "remain calm and allow the investigation (into the killings) to unfold without interference".

A local source told Al-Araby Al-Jadeed that sporadic gunfire could be heard in some areas despite the deployment of security forces and their efforts to restore stability to the city. 

Homs, the country’s third-largest city, has a mixed population of Sunni and Shia Muslims, Alawites and Christians.

Tensions erupted in the city in the weeks after former President Bashar al-Assad, a member of the Alawite minority, was unseated in an offensive led by Sunni Islamist rebels. But since then the situation in Homs has largely remained calm.

The city was spared from the major outbreak of sectarian violence on Syria’s coast in March. After pro-Assad armed groups ambushed members of the new government’s security forces on the coast, the ensuing clashes escalated into revenge attacks in which hundreds of Alawite civilians were killed.

A trial opened last week of some of the hundreds of suspects linked to the coastal violence.