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12 Men Said to Be Islamist Militants Are Detained in Beirut 17 Said to Be Islamist Militants Held in Beirut for Suspected Assassination Plot
(about 5 hours later)
BEIRUT — Lebanese security forces detained 12 men in a Beirut hotel on Friday, in what local news media reported was a move to capture members of the Sunni militant group ISIS who were suspected of plotting to assassinate a leading Shiite political figure. BEIRUT — Lebanese security forces arrested 17 men in two Beirut hotels on Friday on suspicion that they were plotting to assassinate a prominent Lebanese Shiite leader, a government official said, describing an attack that could inflame sectarian conflict across the Middle East.
Security forces blocked off numerous streets in Hamra, the main commercial district of West Beirut, and surrounded the Napoleon Hotel. Outside the hotel, in a neighborhood of narrow streets full of shops, apartments and midrange hotels, dozens of armed security officers forced pedestrians off the streets, then led 12 men, their heads covered, out of the hotel. Investigators are exploring whether the men intended to kill Nabih Berri, the speaker of Parliament, who has been a leading Shiite political figure in Lebanon for decades, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity under government rules. Intelligence reports identified the men as members of a newly established militant cell in Beirut that was believed to include foreigners, the official said, adding that there were suspicions that they belonged to the Islamic State inIraq and Syria, the Sunni militant group known as ISIS.
According to Lebanese news channels, security forces were still hunting down other militants believed to be at large in the Hamra neighborhood. The channels said that the militant cell comprised mostly foreigners, including Syrians, Iraqis, Pakistanis and others, and that as many as 17 men had been arrested or were being sought. Such a plot would be a bold and dangerous escalation by ISIS, which wields extremist and sectarian ideology and brutal tactics in its drive to erase the existing nations in the region and create a fundamentalist Islamic caliphate in their place. The group’s insurgent fighters, who already control large parts of northeastern Syria, swept across northern Iraq last week, slaughtering captured Shiite soldiers and proudly broadcasting the killings on the Internet.
Earlier on Friday, the Amal movement, a Shiite political party, canceled a conference at a United Nations building downtown, citing security concerns. NOW Lebanon, a local news website, reported that the ISIS members arrested were suspected of planning to assassinate Amal’s leader, the parliament speaker, Nabih Berri, and Maj. Gen. Abbas Ibrahim, the commander of Lebanon’s general security agency. Spreading their attacks to Lebanon, the region’s most religiously diverse country, could intensify the destabilizing sectarian conflict. The most powerful force in the country is Hezbollah, the Shiite militant group and political party, which is allied both with Mr. Berri’s Amal movement and with President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, where the chaos of a three-year insurgency has provided fertile ground for ISIS to grow.
Amal is an ally of Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite party and militant group that has provided decisive military help to President Bashar al-Assad of Syria against insurgents, including Sunni jihadist groups. Hezbollah has provided Mr. Assad with crucial military help against his armed opponents, fighting mainly in parts of Syria near the Lebanese border and around Damascus, the Syrian capital; the presence of ISIS in those areas is far smaller than in the north and eastern regions bordering Iraq.
As the events unfolded in Beirut, there were reports of a suicide car bombing at a Lebanese Army checkpoint on the main Beirut-Damascus highway in Lebanon’s eastern Bekaa Valley. Lebanon’s Interior Ministry announced that two members of the security forces were killed and at least six were among the many wounded in the bombing. ISIS has threatened for months to expand its campaign into Lebanon, and many Lebanese are worried that the group, flush with its swift gains in Iraq, will turn next to disrupting the relative calm in the country, or that imitators could multiply in pockets of Sunni militancy in the northern city of Tripoli and elsewhere.
The authorities said they were investigating whether the Bekaa car bomb had been an attempt to target General Ibrahim. Lebanon is bursting with more than one million refugees from Syria, and is deeply divided over the civil war there, especially over Hezbollah’s involvement. The group says it sent its fighters to intervene on Mr. Assad’s side to defend against the extremism that threatens the region. Its main Sunni rivals in Lebanon, the Future Movement, say that Hezbollah has made the sectarian conflict in the region worse by helping to crush an uprising by Syria’s Sunni majority. While Lebanese militants have joined both sides in Syria, political leaders and security officials of all stripes here have tried to keep the fighting from spreading back across the border into Lebanon.
Inside Syria, a car bomb in a village near the city of Hama killed more than 30 and wounded more than 50, according to Syria’s state news agency. The agency blamed the attack on anti-Assad rebels. On Friday, a suicide attacker detonated a car bomb at a checkpoint in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, killing a security officer and wounding more than 20 people. The attack was the first car bombing in the country in nearly three months. Coupled with the arrests in Beirut, the attack in the Bekaa sent ripples of anxiety through a country that had been cautiously enjoying a respite.
ISIS members have been threatening for months to expand their campaign to establish an Islamic state into Lebanon, and Syrian insurgents have threatened a new wave of attacks on Hezbollah-related targets after the group helped push them out of areas in Syria close to the Lebanese border over the past several months. Sunni militant groups detonated a number of car bombs in Hezbollah-dominated areas over the past year, killing scores of civilians, but there had been no attacks since March, when Hezbollah and the Syrian Army drove insurgents out of much of the area along the Syrian-Lebanese border.
Their presence in Hamra, a commercial and tourist center, raised new concerns among Lebanese who had cautiously been enjoying a renewed sense of security. In the raid on Friday, security forces blocked off numerous streets in Hamra, the main commercial district of West Beirut, and surrounded the Napoleon Hotel. In the narrow streets outside the hotel, lined with shops, bars and apartments, dozens of officers cleared pedestrians off the sidewalks and then led 14 men out with their heads covered. Three more men were arrested at the Casa D’Or hotel a short distance away.
Over the past year, numerous bombings have targeted areas in Beirut and the Bekaa where Hezbollah holds sway, killing scores of civilians. But since Hezbollah and the Syrian Army consolidated control over the border, the tensions in Lebanon had lowered, and there had been no bombings for several months. Lebanese news channels reported that most of the suspects were foreigners from Syria, Iraq, Pakistan or elsewhere. The government official said that the men’s identities were still being checked, and declined to say whether any of them were Lebanese.
In recent days, however, fighting has stepped up along the border as the Syrian government said it was again attacking insurgents there. Lebanon is deeply divided, largely along sectarian lines, over the conflict in neighboring Syria, where foreign-led ISIS has established a foothold in the north and east and clashed with Syrian-led Sunni insurgents before its lightning advance across Iraq last week. Earlier in the day, Mr. Berri’s political party, the Amal movement, canceled a conference that was to be held at a United Nations building in downtown Beirut, and cited security concerns as the reason.
Lebanon’s main rival factions, Hezbollah and the Future Movement, respectively back the Syrian government and the Syrian opposition. But the country’s political factions and security forces have worked to keep most of the fighting outside of Lebanon. The government official denied local reports that the car bomb in the Bekaa Valley on Friday was aimed at Maj. Gen. Abbas Ibrahim, the head of Lebanon’s general security service, which is seen as closer to Hezbollah than the country’s other security agencies are. He said the police saw and followed a suspicious vehicle headed toward Beirut, causing the driver to change course; when the vehicle was stopped at a checkpoint, the bomb went off, he said.
The official said the arrests in Beirut were made by a joint task force from the general security service and from the intelligence arm of the national police, which is seen as closer to the Future Movement. He said the agencies acted preemptively to prevent worse violence, and that given the degree of regional chaos surrounding Lebanon, they are performing well.
“We are ready,” General Ibrahim told the local channel LBCI. “We will not become another Iraq.”