Beirut bombing kills 10, many wounded: reports

Source: AFP

BEIRUT (AFP) - A powerful bomb targeting a security convoy killed at least 10 people and wounded many more in a Christian area of the Lebanese capital, Beirut, on Friday, local television reported.

An army official put the death toll at three and told AFP that Captain Wissam Eid, a member of the Internal Security Forces, was one of the dead.

Flames engulfed cars, trapping several people as firefighters battled to extinguish the fires and security forces cordoned off the area.

Thick black smoke curled into the sky as ambulances rushed to the scene, an area of office buildings and parking lots on a highway leading out of Beirut.



Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080125/wl_afp/lebanonunrest_080125093433

Source: BBC News


Read more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7208458.stm

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The force of the blast, which struck midmorning in Hazmieh on the Lebanese capital's eastern edge, set a dozen vehicles ablaze and ripped a crater in the asphalt two meters wide and a meter deep.

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Lebanon's sports minister, Ahmed Fatfat, said Eid was on his way home from a meeting at the headquarters of the UN commission investigating the 2005 assassination of former Premier Rafik Hariri. The commission's office is in a hilltop village about a 15-minute drive from the site of the explosion.

Lebanon has been hit by a series of explosions, some of them political assassinations, amid a deepening 14-month political crisis. Friday's blast came a day after a labor strike that was largely peaceful, and 10 days after a car bomb aimed at a U.S. Embassy car killed three bystanders.

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Friday's bombing was the second attack against the department in less than two years. On Sept. 5, 2006, Lt. Col. Samir Shehade, deputy head of the intelligence department in Lebanon's national police force, was wounded when his convoy was targeted by an explosion in the town of Rmeileh, just north of the southern city of Sidon. The explosion killed four people in his convoy.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/948226.html