GENEVA (AP) — The killings took place under a late spring sun. The squads poured into the Syrian village of Houla on foot and in vehicles: cars, minivans and pickups mounted with machine guns.

At the end, more than 100 people were dead — nearly half of them children — in what the United Nations described for the first time Wednesday as a war crime perpetrated by the government forces and shabiha militia backing the regime of President Bashar Assad.

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