At the same time, troops and security forces opened fire on anti-regime protesters who streamed out of mosques after Friday prayers nationwide. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 27 civilians were killed.
The morning blasts in the northern city of Aleppo, Syria’s most populous, ripped apart the facades of the local headquarters of the Military Intelligence Directorate and a barracks of the Security Preservation forces in another part of the city.
At the Directorate, windows were shattered and a large crater was torn into the pavement outside the entrance. A weeping correspondent on state-run TV showed graphic footage of at least five corpses, collected in sacks and under blankets by the side of the road.
At both sites, suicide bombers in explosives-packed vehicles tried to smash into the entrances, security officials said. At the barracks, the Security Preservation forces commander Brig. Firas Abbas told an Associated Press reporter on a government-guided visit to the scene that the vehicle made it through one roadblock before detonating near the gates.
State television cited the Health Ministry as saying 28 people were killed in the two blasts and 235 wounded, including civilians and military personnel. It didn’t give a breakdown of the individual casualty toll for each blast.
State TV blamed ‘‘terrorists.’’ Anti-Assad activists accused the regime of setting off Friday’s blasts to discredit the opposition and avert protests that had been planned in the city on Friday.
Capt. Ammar al-Wawi of the Free Syrian Army, a rebel group that wants to bring down the regime by force, denied involvement. He said fighters from his group had a short gunbattle with troops several hundred yards (meters) from the Directorate about an hour before the explosion but they did not carry out the bombings.
