W. Beirut Bank Blast Kills 3, Leaves 27 Hurt

A large bomb exploded in a crowded neighborhood in West Beirut on Friday, and police reported three people were killed and 27 others were injured.

Police said the blast outside the Bank of Beirut and Arab Countries, minutes after closing Friday wrecked cars and damaged three nearby buildings, set cars ablaze and left a 10-foot-deep crater in the sidewalk. The official National News Agency reported that the count of wounded exceeded 30.

Police bomb experts said that 55 pounds of explosives were attached to a mortar shell and exploded simultaneously outside the bank in mostly Muslim West Beirut.

“The high number of casualties were caused by a shell being used and its sending shrapnel flying across the busy area,” a police spokesman said.

“This is the first act in a warning addressed to (Cabinet member and Druze Muslim leader) Walid Jumblatt to get his Progressive Socialist Party militiamen out of Beirut,” said an anonymous caller for the previously unknown “Youths of Free Beirut” group.

Dismissed as Hoax In the telephone call to the Christian Voice of Lebanon radio, the man said the bank, believed to be Druze-owned, was paying Jumblatt’s militia. But a Druze spokesman dismissed the warning as a “hoax to fuel dissension between Muslim factions of West Beirut.”

The bank explosion was the fifth bombing of a Druze institution in the past six weeks. Fourteen civilians were killed and 56 others wounded in previous explosions in Beirut and in three other, predominantly Druze, towns.

Meanwhile, state and privately owned radio stations said a 1,200-man Lebanese army brigade has been readied for deployment today along a 22-mile coastal stretch linking Beirut with Israel’s occupation zone in South Lebanon.

The army is to reopen the coastal highway, which has been closed by civil war fighting since February 1983.

The operation would put the army in place to move into South Lebanon should Israel begin withdrawing its occupation forces from the region.

The Lebanese army and Druze militiamen fought artillery battles early Friday in the mountains overlooking Beirut and the coastal highway.