A prominent anti-Syrian journalist and MP and three other people were killed in a car bombing in a Beirut suburb on Monday, the latest in a string of similar attacks in Lebanon.
One witness said the bomb blew up inside Christian MP Gibran Tueni’s vehicle, blasting it off the road and setting it ablaze.
Firemen recovered the body of Tueni (48); that of his driver, Nicolas Flouti; and two other people, the sources said. Ten other people were wounded, two of them seriously, in the attack at about 9am local time in the Christian suburb of Mkalles.
The attack came just a day after United Nations chief investigator Detlev Mehlis delivered a report to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan on Syria’s cooperation with the probe into the February murder of Lebanese ex-premier Rafiq Hariri.
And Druze leader and fellow MP Walid Jumblatt immediately pointed the finger at Syria over the bombing.
”The terrorist message has come to us … the person who threatened on television to make the whole world pay the price,” he said, alluding to remarks made by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on Russian television on Sunday.
Bashar, referring to possible UN sanctions against Damascus, said that if the situation in Syria and Iraq is not good, the Middle East will be unstable and the whole world will pay.
But Syria denied any role in the bombing, at least the 13th in Lebanon since Hariri was killed in a massive bomb blast on the Beirut seafront on February 14.
Syrian Information Minister Mehdi Dakhlallah told Lebanese television LBC that ”foreign interference is at the root of the current chaos”.
Many Lebanese blame Damascus for Hariri’s death, a charge Syria denies, although it has been implicated in a report into the killing by the Mehlis commission.
Later on Monday, the UN Security Council was due to receive the sensitive Mehlis report.
There was no word on the content of the report, which follows one in October that concluded that senior Syrian and Lebanese security officials were implicated in the killing and chided Damascus for failing to cooperate fully with the probe.
As a result of the October report, the Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1636 demanding that Syria fully cooperate with the investigation and threatening international sanctions if it did not comply.
Mehlis, who has indicated that he will step down when his six-month mandate expires on Thursday to return to his work as a magistrate in Germany, was to brief the council on his findings on Tuesday.
Druze Telecommunications Minister Marwan Hamadeh, who is Tueni’s uncle, threatened to resign if Lebanon’s Cabinet did not meet by Monday evening ”to demand an inquiry under the supervision of the Security Council on all the crimes committed by Syria”.
Since Hariri’s death, at least 13 attacks have targeted anti-Syrian figures and people in Lebanon’s Christian areas, includiing well-known journalist Samir Kassir, who was killed on June 2 when a bomb blew up in his car.
The last attack was on September 25 when May Chidiac (40), a Christian news presenter and political talk-show host on LBC television, was maimed by a bomb in her car in the northern outskirts of Beirut.
The attacks have created a climate of fear in Lebanon, with a number of anti-Syrian figures such as Hariri’s MP son Saad Hariri spending much of his time out of the country. — Sapa-AFP