Car bomb kills 4 in latest attack on Hezbollah Beirut stronghold
Print Edition
A car bomb killed four people in southern Beirut yesterday, the fourth attack to hit the Hezbollah bastion since the Shiite group announced its intervention in Syria last year, the health minister said.
The bombing came just weeks after a twin suicide bombing killed 25 people at the Iranian embassy in the same area and marked a new breach of the tight security in Hezbollah’s stronghold in the capital’s southern suburbs.
Hezbollah’s confirmation last April that its fighters had intervened in the Syrian civil war alongside President Bashar Assad’s forces deepened sectarian divisions between Shiites and Sunnis, most of whom sympathize with the rebels.
“The toll from the terrorist explosion in Haret Hreik is four killed and 65 wounded,” health minister Ali Hassan Khalil said in a statement carried by the official National News Agency.
Earlier, a ministry source had reported five killed.
Eyewitnesses reported flames and smoke rising from burning vehicles and at least three damaged buildings.
Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television aired footage of bystanders scrambling to douse burning vehicles in a car park.
“The terrorist explosion targeted a densely populated residential area, just 150 to 200 meters away from Hezbollah’s political bureau,” Al-Manar reported, while adding that the building was not thought to have been the target.
The district is symbolic for Hezbollah, which once based many of its leadership institutions in the area. Much of the neighborhood was reduced to rubble by Israeli air bombing in its 2006 war with Hezbollah, but it has since been rebuilt.
The blast hit the busy Al-Arid Street commercial district.
The National News Agency reported that the blast was caused by an explosives-packed four-wheel-drive vehicle.
A statement from caretaker prime minister Najib Mikati said “the hand of terrorism does not differentiate between us, and it does not want stability for this country. Rather, it is planning a despicable conspiracy to drown the Lebanese in sectarian strife.”
Yesterday’s is the fourth bomb attack in south Beirut since Hezbollah announced it was fighting in Syria.
Prior to the bombing of the Iranian embassy, the southern suburbs suffered two bomb attacks. One killed 27 people on August 15. A blast earlier that month caused no fatalities but wounded some 50 people.
It also comes less than a week on from a car bomb in central Beirut that killed eight people, including anti-Syrian former finance minister Mohammed Chatah.
And car bomb attacks against two mosques in northern Lebanon’s majority Sunni Tripoli on August 24 killed 42 people.
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