Car bomb, rocket fire kill 45 people in Homs

In one of the deadliest attacks to hit the central Syrian city of Homs, a car bomb and rocket attack on a government-held district killed at least 45 people and wounded 85 on Tuesday, the provincial governor said.

Governor Talal al-Barazi told AFP the car bomb detonated in the Abbasid area of the Zahra neighbourhood, killing 36 people, adding that the blast was followed by rocket fire that killed nine others. At the time of the bomb's detonation, the neighborhood was crowded with pedestrians, leading to the high death toll, Barazi said.

Most of the neighbourhood's residents are from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's Alawite community, AFP reports.

"The rocket fell about half an hour after the bombing on the same area, where there was a crowd of people" trying to help those injured in the blast, he said.

On Twitter, photos of the bombing emerged soon after it was reported, although the Tweet's attribution of the bombing to the Al-Nusra Front could not be verified:

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group based in Britain, put the death toll at 37 dead, with nearly 80 injured. All of the dead are civilians, among them at least five children, the Observatory reported.

Several neighborhoods in Syria's third-largest city have been under siege for nearly two years as a once 1,200-strong rebel presence stood off with Syrian military forces. In recent weeks, military forces have advanced with several major assaults ahead of the country's presidential elections scheduled for June. Rebels control just a few remaining districts. In the Old City, a few hundred fighters remain after a UN-led operation to evacuate civilians left to survive with almost no food or medicine.

Earlier this month, the Syrian army launched a ground assault against rebel-held parts of the city, entering some neighbourhoods for the first time in nearly a year.