Mob Pillages Morocco’s Beirut Office : Embassy Ransacked as Muslims Protest Summit With Israeli

About 3,000 fundamentalist Muslims enraged at the Israeli-Moroccan summit stormed the Moroccan Embassy in south Beirut today, overpowering guards and going on a rampage of destruction, police said.

The protesters, including armed youths from the pro-Iranian Hezbollah Party, swept pass 10 policemen and troops guarding the building, broke down the embassy gate and entered the building, police said.

They damaged furniture, made a bonfire of hundreds of documents and papers and burned the Moroccan flag, police said.

Angry demonstrators--some carrying automatic rifles and pistols--ripped a big photograph of Moroccan King Hassan II off the wall of the main room and trampled it.

‘Sadat No. 2’

Clergymen led the rioters, who shouted “Death to Israel and to the traitor, Sadat No. 2”--a reference to Hassan.

Civil defense units and firemen were dispatched to the two-story embassy and quickly extinguished the fires, police said.

Before storming the embassy, the fundamentalist demonstrators “threw stones on the building and shattered window glass,” a police spokesman said. “They inflicted other damage and civil defense units were dispatched to the embassy.”

Police said that the embassy’s six-member staff fled before the attack began and that no one was hurt.

General Strike Called

The demonstration coincided with a daylong general strike in Lebanon’s Muslim areas to protest the Israel-Morocco talks. No similar action was taken in Christian areas.

The demonstrators assembled in a mainly Shia Muslim neighborhood in south Beirut before they marched on the embassy, the private Voice of the Nation radio station said.

Police guards said they were outnumbered by the mob estimated at 3,000 people and could not prevent the attack.

“In front of this huge number of demonstrators we were incapable of doing anything,” said one police officer on the scene, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Earlier Peaceful Protest

About 100 Shia and Sunni fundamentalists demonstrated peacefully outside the embassy two days ago and burned the Moroccan, American and Israeli flags.

In the daylong strike in West Beirut, shops, schools, banks and restaurants shut down in response to a call by Muslim and leftist militias and political parties. They called the decision by Hassan to meet Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres in Morocco a “stab in the back to all Islamic and Arab values.”