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Fatal Beirut blast targets Hezbollah stronghold Fatal Beirut blast targets Hezbollah stronghold
(about 3 hours later)
An explosion has rocked Beirut's southern suburbs, killing four people and injuring dozens, Lebanese media and security forces have reported. A car bomb ripped through a Shia neighbourhood in southern Beirut on Tuesday, killing four people, in the latest attack targeting supporters of Lebanon's militant Hezbollah group.
The blast – a suicide car bombing according to initial reports – hit a Hezbollah stronghold that has been the repeated target of car bomb attacks in recent months. It was the second bombing in the neighbourhood of Haret Hreik this month amid a series of attacks that have shaken Lebanon in a spillover of Syria's civil war into its smaller neighbour.
Images broadcast on the Shia Muslim militant movement's Al-Manar channel showed flames erupting from a building and a large plume of smoke billowing above the charred remains of cars as a crowd gathered near the bomb site in Haret Hreik on Tuesday morning. The violence has targeted both Lebanon's Sunnis and Shias and has further stoked sectarian tensions that are already running high as each Lebanese community lines up with its brethren in Syria on opposing sides of the war.
A car bomb attack killed at least five people in Haret Hreik earlier this month. As the car bomb went off, thousands of people flocked to the southern Beirut district. Footage broadcast by the Hezbollah-owned al-Manar television station showed medics hauling a man on a stretcher out of the area as flames engulfed a building and debris littered the busy commercial street.
Tensions from the war in neighbouring Syria have increasingly spilled over into Lebanon. The Lebanese Red Cross, in a statement to the state-run National News Agency, said that along with the four killed, 35 people were wounded in the explosion.
The politically powerful Hezbollah has sent fighters and advisers to Syria to help its ally President Bashar al-Assad, a member of the Shia-derived Alawite minority, in his fight against mainly Sunni rebels. A group known as al-Nusra Front in Lebanon claimed responsibility for the attack, saying it was in retaliation for Hezbollah's military support of President Bashar al-Assad's forces in Syria.
Hezbollah-run areas in Lebanon have been targeted by a string of rocket and bomb attacks in recent months claimed by hardline Sunni militants. The claim was posted on the group's Twitter account. Its name suggested ties to the al-Qaida-linked Nusra Front in Syria, one of the most powerful Sunni militant brigades fighting Assad's troops and their allies.
"There was a car beeping, and then it exploded," an eyewitness told the Voice of Lebanon radio station. "Then we saw people on the ground like every time."
Similar attacks have targeted Shia areas in Lebanon in recent months in retaliation for the Shia Hezbollah fighters' role in the civil war next door where Assad's forces are battling chaotic bands of Sunni rebels, including extremists fighters linked to al-Qaida.
While Lebanon's Shias have broadly supported Assad's rule, the country's Sunni community generally aides their brethren in Syria and Sunni groups such as the al-Nusra Front in Lebanon have sought to punish Lebanon's Shias.
Shortly after Tuesday's bombing, clashes broke out in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli, killing at least one person. The city, with impoverished rival Sunni and Shia areas, has seen frequent sectarian clashes linked to the war Syria that have killed dozens.