UN envoy Ibrahim Gambari met separately with junta chief Than Shwe and opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi today, ending a four-day mission to Burma to try to halt a crackdown on the biggest democracy protests in 20 years.
Mr Gambari expects to return to the country early next month at the government's request, UN sources said.
As he left Burma, there was no word on whether Mr Gambari's meeting with Senior General Than Shwe, who rarely heeds the outside world, had persuaded him to relax his iron grip or start talks with Ms Suu Kyi, a long-detained Nobel laureate.
Last week's protests in Burma's largest city, Rangoon, involved up to 100,000 people and were ruthlessly halted by security forces who imposed curfews and killed 10 people, according to government figures.
The death toll is likely far higher, human rights groups and Western governments say. And thousands of Buddhist monks around whom many protesters rallied, were reportedly arrested at their monasteries and removed to special prisons in north of the country.
There were fears of a repeat of 1988, when the army crushed a nationwide uprising and killed an estimated 3,000 people over several months.
In Geneva, the UN Human Rights Council condemned the "violent repression" and called on the junta to allow its investigator to visit for the first time in four years.
"Light must absolutely be shed on what happened," Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, UN special rapporteur for human rights in Myanmar, told the council, which adopted a resolution by the European Union deploring beatings, killings and arbitrary detentions.
Witnesses reported fewer troops on the streets of Rangoon today but raids on homes by pro-junta gangs looking for dissident monks and civilians suggested Mr Gambari's diplomacy and international calls for restraint had made little difference.
"They are going from apartment to apartment, shaking things inside, threatening the people," a Bangkok-based expert on Rangoon said.
"You have a climate of terror all over the city."