23rd August, 2013
Powerful car bombs exploded Friday outside two Sunni mosques in a Lebanese city riven by strife over the war in neighbouring Syria, killing 29 people and wounding 500, officials said.
That was the highest toll in an attack since Lebanon’s 1975-1990 civil war.
Coming a week after a bombing in the Beirut bastion of Shiite party Hezbollah, a close ally of Bashar al-Assad, the bombings risk further exacerbating tensions between supporters and foes of the Syrian president.
“There are at least 29 dead and 500 wounded, many of whom are in serious condition with burns and with head wounds,” said Georges Kettaneh, director of the Lebanese Red Cross.
Both blasts hit as worshippers were filing out after weekly Muslim prayers, in a city where Sunni supporters of Syria’s rebels engaged in frequent, often deadly, clashes with Alawites, who back the Assad regime.
An AFP reporter saw a number of charred bodies near the Al-Taqwa mosque, in the port area, and the bodies of five children brought out from it.
As huge clouds of black smoke billowed into the air, television channels aired footage of the dead, of buildings with their fronts blown in and vehicles ablaze.
People rushed to help the wounded, as others hysterically sought their loved ones.
Hundreds of furious people gathered outside the Al-Taqwa mosque shouting curses at Hezbollah and the Syrian regime.
The powerful Shiite movement, whose militia have been fighting for months alongside Assad’s troops, linked the Tripoli attacks to the one in Beirut on August 15, which killed 22 people and injured more than 300.
It said they were part of a plan to “plunge Lebanon into chaos and destruction”.
Former premier Saad Hariri, a Sunni and Hezbollah opponent, said the “authors of dissension do not want Lebanon to live in peace for one minute; they want the killing machine to mow down the lives of innocents across Lebanon”.
The first blast hit in the city centre and was also near the home of outgoing Prime Minister Najib Mikati, although his office said he was not in Tripoli at the time.
The second struck near the port of the restive city with a Sunni majority, close to the home of former police chief Ashraf Rifi, a security source said.
On Wednesday, army chief General Jean Kahwaji said his forces were fighting a “total war” against terrorism whose aim is “to provoke sectarian strife” in the country.
The army had been pursuing a “terrorist cell that prepares car bombs and sends them to residential neighbourhoods,” he said.
“The gravity… lies in the fact that this cell is not targeting any one region or community in particular, but that it aims to provoke sectarian strife by targeting different regions.”
A Lebanese and two Palestinians suspected of preparing a car bomb attack were arrested days after the latest blast in Beirut, the General Security agency said.
They were accused of planning to plant a car laden with 250 kilograms (550 pounds) of explosives in the Naameh area, also in southern Beirut, the agency added.
Tripoli has seen frequent Syria-related violence over the past two years, including waves of deadly clashes.
Lebanon is officially neutral in Syria’s conflict, but the country is deeply divided.
Hilal Khashan, chairman of the political science department at the American University of Beirut, said: “It is clear that there is a desire to trigger a confessional war in Lebanon to divert attention from what is happening in Syria.”
Friday’s car bombings were reminiscent of attacks that shook the country during the civil war, but Khashan said he did not think a confessional war would break out “because it will not benefit anyone.”