Lebanon’s outgoing Defence Minister Elias Murr was wounded on Tuesday morning in an explosion in a Christian suburb just north of the capital Beirut that also caused fatalities, the police said.
Police said that the blast had caused deaths but did not say how many had been killed or wounded.
They said that the minister was lightly wounded while he was driving in his car in the Naccache region, close to Antelias in the Christian suburbs around 10km north of Beirut.
Murr, the son-in-law of President Emile Lahoud and deputy prime minister, was taken to Serhal hospital, where an employee said his condition was ”good”.
Seven people were hospitalised, some of them with serious injuries, hospital sources said.
According to rescue services on the scene, an unidentified person was killed in the blast.
Television pictures showed victims of the blast covered in blood, one of whom, clearly in severe shock, was being helped out of the wreckage of a car through the sun roof and lifted onto a stretcher by rescue workers.
The images showed the burned out and blackened shells of two cars as well as what appeared to be a corpse. Rescue services had descended on the devastated scene and were dousing the still smouldering remains.
The explosion, whose cause has not been determined, comes after anti-Damascus politician George Hawi was killed in a Beirut bomb blast in mid-June in just the latest of a string of bloody attacks in the country.
That attack came days after anti-Syrian journalist Samir Kassir was killed when a bomb exploded under his car in Beirut in an attack blamed on the pro-Syrian regime and widely condemned at home and abroad.
The string of attacks in Lebanon have reignited anti-Syrian feelings stoked after the February assassination in Beirut of popular billionaire and former premier Rafiq Hariri.
Hariri’s murder triggered a massive popular uprising which helped pave the way for the withdrawal of Syrian troops that was completed at the end of April under the weight of intense international pressure.
The new blast also comes as Lebanon’s prime minister designate Fuad Siniora presses on with talks to form a new coalition partners after the opposition’s victory in parliamentary elections.
Siniora’s Future Movement, which with 37 seats heads the largest bloc in Lebanon’s parliament, is led by Saad Hariri, the son of the slain Rafiq Hariri.
The pro-Damascus Lahoud agreed to designate 62-year-old Siniora, a close ally of Rafiq Hariri, after all but two MPs nominated him for the prime minister’s post.
Siniora has made clear a major priority for new government is to uncover the truth about the assassination of Hariri and subsequent killings of Hawi and Kassir. – Sapa-AFP