Bomb in Child’s School Bag Kills 9 in E. Beirut

A bomb hidden in a child’s school bag wrecked several shops today in Christian East Beirut, killing nine people and wounding at least 15, police said. A 7-year-old girl and her father were among the dead.

A shopkeeper staggered along the street screaming, “I’ve lost my wife!” Rescuers found her under the rubble, wounded, a few minutes later.

Civil defense director Elie Hneineh said the bomb contained about 45 pounds of TNT attached to a rocket warhead packed inside a child’s school bag.

It wrecked at least five shops on the ground floor of the 10-story Senate Office Building in the New Jedeideh district.

A reporter at the scene said walls of the wrecked shops were spattered with blood. Passers-by were cut down by shrapnel when the bomb exploded without warning at 3:05 p.m., she said.

The bombing was the sixth in 24 hours in the capital’s Christian sector. It occurred as Christians and Muslims battled with tanks and mortars around the strategic mountaintop army base of Souq el Gharb, eight miles southeast of Beirut.

Police said at least 11 people had been killed and 30 wounded during that period in an upsurge of violence that has raised fears of a new, vicious round in the 10-year-old civil war that has taken more than 100,000 lives.

Fighting and bombings have increased since a daylong battle Jan. 15 in which President Amin Gemayel’s forces crushed the Lebanese Forces, a Christian militia led by Elie Hobeika, who had challenged the president’s leadership of the Christian community.