Regime troops used tear gas yesterday to try to disperse a mass funeral attended by thousands of people who took to the streets of the Syrian capital to mourn slain protesters, a rights group said.

“Syrian regime forces used tear gas to disperse people attending the funerals of the Kfar Sousa martyrs and calling for the fall of the regime,” the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

The protests were staged after deadly blasts rocked Damascus and the country’s second city Aleppo earlier yesterday, the Observatory said.

The latest violence came just two days before a scheduled parliamentary election in Syria, where President Bashar al-Assad’s regime has been trying to crush an uprising since March 2011.

One explosion hit a car wash as a bus was passing in a suburb of Aleppo, the country’s commercial hub in the north, said Rami Abdel Rahman of the Syrian Observatory.

At least five people were killed in the blast, he told AFP in Beirut.

But the state-run SANA news agency reported three deaths in Aleppo, and said 21 others were wounded, two of them in critical condition.

The dead included a 10-year-old boy killed “in the explosion of a booby-trapped passenger car parked by a terrorist outside a car wash,” the agency reported. Pictures of the bombing released by SANA showed extensive damage to buildings and cars, including a red car flattened by slabs of concrete and a mini van with the boot obliterated.

Aleppo has been the scene of escalating violence, including a regime raid on the university, according to the Observatory.

Two blasts also hit Damascus yesterday, Abdel Rahman said. “One explosion occurred inside the city, and the other hit the periphery” where three soldiers were wounded, he added.

Television footage showed a mangled car destroyed by one of the explosions that tore through a city street.

Abdel Rahman accused the regime of launching the attacks to stop funerals a day after the security forces killed 30 anti-regime protesters, including nine in the Kfar Sousa and Tadamon districts of Damascus.

The Observatory says more than 600 people have been killed nationwide during a tenuous truce that went into effect April 12.

Also in Damascus, troops opened fire in the central neighbourhood of Barzeh, as they carried out multiple raids and made arbitrary arrests, the watchdog said.

Despite the violence, mourners took to the streets of Kfar Sousa, just under a kilometre from the prime minister’s office, as shown in an amateur broadcast posted online by activists.