Car Bomb Kills 15, Injures 120 in East Beirut

A car bomb Wednesday sent a devastating ball of fire through a packed neighborhood in Christian East Beirut, killing at least 15 people and injuring more than 120 others.

The blast and fire shattered and burned businesses and apartment buildings over a wide area.

Lebanese army explosive experts said a Mercedes-Benz sedan was loaded with more than 300 pounds of TNT, mortar shells and construction nails when it exploded at mid-morning in the Saad el Baouchriye neighborhood. Police sources said the car had been fitted with extra gasoline tanks that turned the vehicle into a firebomb when a timing device triggered the blast.

No person or group immediately claimed responsibility.

August Bakhos, a Christian member of Lebanon’s Parliament, declared: “We’re living in a jungle . . . . None of us knows when his turn will come.”

Police said Wednesday’s blast was the bloodiest incident in East Beirut since May 22, when 55 people were killed and 176 were injured in a lunch-hour car bombing in the Sin el Fil neighborhood, which came just as children were being dismissed from school down the street.

In March, more than 80 people were killed and 250 wounded when a car bomb exploded near the home of Sheik Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah in Beirut’s Shia Muslim district of Ghbaire. Fadlallah, a leader of the militant Shia Muslim movement Hezbollah (Party of God), escaped unhurt in the apparent assassination attempt.

Since the start of this year, there have been at least 20 major car or truck bomb blasts in Lebanon, killing more than 270 people and injuring at least 800.

Witnesses to Wednesday’s blast said a young man parked the car 15 minutes before the blast and casually walked away. Police sources said the automobile was stolen some time ago.

Health and Social Affairs Minister Joseph Hashem, a Christian member of Lebanon’s beleaguered national unity government, was at the scene to supervise rescue operations. He declared that the blast was “aimed at sabotaging efforts to bring about a national reconciliation in Lebanon to end the civil war.”

The force of the explosion reduced a seven-story building to a skeleton, tossed cars into the air as if they were toys and spewed out a fireball that gutted more than 25 apartments.

“That was a restaurant, a shop and a supermarket,” an old man said, pointing at a massive pile of rubble.

Man Refuses to Leave

One elderly man, with smoke billowing out of his badly damaged apartment building, refused to leave his home. Hashem went to the building to ask the man to leave.

“I went to convince him to save his life. The building is uninhabitable,” Hashem said.

Many of the wounded lost limbs to jagged pieces of shrapnel. Blood was splashed on storefronts and on sidewalks dozens of yards away.

A bloody child’s T-shirt, a single shoe and a child’s bicycle lay in the three-foot-deep crater gouged out of the road by the explosion.