‘Car-Bomb War’ Breaks Out in Beirut; Latest Blasts Kill 29 : 2 Explosions Come Day After Christian Vow of Revenge

Two car bombs exploded 10 minutes apart outside a restaurant and a mosque in Muslim West Beirut today, killing 29 people and wounding 82 others, police said.

The bombings came a day after Christian militia commanders vowed revenge on their Muslim foes for a car bombing that killed 55 people, mostly women, and wounded 119 in Christian East Beirut on Saturday.

“We have a car-bomb war on our hands now,” said the privately owned Muslim Voice of the Nation radio. The bombings today triggered sectarian fighting along the Green Line that divides the capital’s Muslim and Christian areas.

Police said 25 people were killed and 75 wounded when a green Peugeot laden with an estimated 77 pounds of powerful Hexogene explosives detonated outside the Hamadeh restaurant in West Beirut’s Karakol el Druze residential neighborhood at 12:05 p.m.

Blast Outside Mosque

A red car rigged with an estimated 110 pounds of TNT went off 10 minutes later outside the Rawdat al Shadidein mosque in the Shia Muslim suburb of Ghobeiri, killing four people, police said. Seven other people were injured.

A previously unknown group calling itself the Black Brigades telephoned a Western news agency in Beirut and said it bombed the restaurant to counter “a war of extermination aimed against our Christian people.”

The Christian Voice of Lebanon radio said it received a call from a man claiming to represent a group called the Arafat Forces, which he said carried out the restaurant attack. The radio speaks for the rightist Christian Falange party, a staunch foe of Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Neither of the claims could be independently verified.

Today’s first explosion, just after noon, wrecked the first two floors of a six-story building, including the Hamadeh restaurant, and set three floors of an adjacent nine-story apartment building on fire.

15 Cars Set on Fire

AP newsman Samir Ghattas, reporting from Karakol el Druze, said the force of the blast hurled passing cars on top of each other. At least 15 were set ablaze.

Civil defense rescuers and Muslim militiamen on the scene said most of the casualties of the explosion were passing motorists.

“I saw a man burning in his car and I couldn’t help,” said Malek Joun, 15.

A woman ran up the glass-littered street, pulling her hair and screaming: “It’s a massacre, it’s a massacre!”

A 10-year-old girl, walking through the wreckage with her weeping mother and sister, sobbed, “My two sisters are dead.”

Druze Militia Blamed

The residential district is controlled by Druze militiamen, whom Christian leaders blamed for Saturday’s supermarket bombing.

The Ghobeiri area where the second explosion took place is controlled by Shias, allies of the Druze against the Christians in Lebanon’s 10-year-old civil war.

In apparent retaliation for the West Beirut bombings, Muslim gunmen stopped a busload of Christian restaurant staff and arrested 24 of them as they headed toward Beirut airport on a Middle East Airlines bus, official Beirut radio said.

Four hours later the Christians were freed unharmed and taken to the West Beirut home of Amal militia leader Nabih Berri, who had intervened to secure their release, the radio said.