Druze Official Wounded; New Clashes Feared

Gunmen firing from a speeding car shot and wounded a Druze militia chief Friday, sparking new tensions between Muslim groups as President Amin Gemayel tried to arrange national unity talks.

The unidentified assailants sprayed Imad Nawfal, a senior official of the Druze Progressive Socialist Party militia, with automatic weapons fire, wounding him and his three bodyguards, in an apparent assassination attempt near the offices of West Beirut’s Channel 7 television station, police said.

The victims were taken to the American University Hospital. Their conditions were not immediately learned.

Police Race to Scene

Lebanese police raced to the scene to clear nervous Druze gunmen who appeared on the streets. A coordinating committee implementing a Syrian-backed peace plan in the mainly Muslim western sector of the capital ordered an investigation into the incident amid fears of new clashes between the Druze, an offshoot sect of Islam, and the main Shia Muslim militia, Amal.

In another development, the press attache of the Yemen Embassy was beaten as he waited to enter the western sector across the Green Line, a strip of bombed-out buildings separating the west from the Christian eastern sector.

“I got out of my car to ask if they would allow me to pass quickly. I had been waiting for an hour and had work to do,” said the diplomat, Rashid Ali Aklan.

“A soldier asked me where I came from, and when I said Yemen, he started beating me,” Aklan said.

Removal Planned

The coordinating committee, composed of army and militia representatives and five Syrian observers, plans to narrow the Green Line on its western side by removing Muslim militiamen from the area, the independent newspaper An Nahar said.

Police, Army Patrolling

The Syrian-sponsored security arrangement was imposed at dawn Tuesday. Syrian advisers are here to see that the plan works, and riot police backed by a special army unit were patrolling the Muslim sector to enforce it.

The coordinating committee reported earlier that government authority was being effectively restored in the city’s Muslim sector. Reporters have seen militiamen on the streets, however, in civilian clothes and without their automatic rifles, evidently carrying sidearms. And battles continue daily across the three-mile-long line that divides Beirut into Muslim and Christian sectors.

The ultimate goal of the security arrangement, as expressed previously by both Lebanese and Syrian officials, is to end the 10-year-old civil war that has cost an estimated 100,000 lives.

Syria has supported previous peace efforts that failed, but this is the first time it has become a participant by sending advisers to see that its wishes are carried out. It also maintains at least 25,000 troops in eastern Lebanon.