Bomb Kills 25 in Beirut; Rites for 32 Are Held

A car bomb blew up in a market teeming with pedestrians, vendors and taxicabs in Muslim West Beirut on Tuesday, killing 25 people and wounding 170, police said.

The explosion occurred as a mass funeral was being conducted a few miles away in the Christian eastern sector of the city for 32 victims of a car bombing the day before.

No one claimed responsibility for either explosion, but the blasts raised fears of a new round of deadly retaliations by Beirut’s Christians and Muslims.

On Monday, the detonation of a white Mercedes-Benz sedan packed with a quarter-ton of explosives killed 32 people and wounded 140 in East Beirut’s Ein Rummaneh residential district. Initial estimates had put the deaths at 25.

165 Pounds of Explosives

At 11 a.m. on Tuesday, a gray Volkswagen Golf laden with 165 pounds of explosives, the charge bolstered by mortar rounds to intensify the blast, erupted 20 yards from Barbir Hospital.

The Barbir area, which takes its name from the 220-bed hospital, was jammed with people, and the blast hurled bodies into the air. The Volkswagen was parked in front of a 13-story building, and the explosion devastated 20 shops on the ground floor. The building’s first three floors were reduced to a shell.

More than 30 cars were set ablaze, and the streets, soon awash with water from fire hoses, were littered with broken glass and twisted metal. Smoke billowed from the cars and from burning stores nearby.

Barbir Hospital, 300 yards west of the so-called Green Line dividing the capital into sectarian halves, has been hit frequently in shelling duels between Muslim and Christian militia gunners during Lebanon’s 11 years of factional fighting. When the bomb exploded Tuesday, people inside the hospital thought at first that it was being shelled again.

Zoheir Sayyed said he and his brother Kamal were in the basement of their men’s wear shop while their father tended customers upstairs.

“Suddenly this deafening blast blew me and my brother off our chairs,” Sayyed said. “Then I struggled up and raced up the stairs. My father was lying bleeding at the corner of the shop. We took him to hospital.”

As he spoke, Sayyed’s white shirt was stained with his father’s blood.

A 20-year-old customer in the shop, Ismail Fardous, blood dripping from his neck, searched the shop for his father.

“My father had just left the shop when the explosion happened. I bounced in the air from the force of the blast. There was plenty of smoke around me, and I felt as if I was being electrocuted,” Fardous said.

“I still can’t find my father.”

Syrian and Lebanese troops and members of the Shia Muslim militia Amal quickly cordoned off the site, firing submachine guns into the air to clear a path for ambulances and fire trucks.

Aiding Lebanese Army

The Syrians have an estimated 500 soldiers in West Beirut helping the Lebanese army enforce a month-old security plan aimed at ending the chaotic reign of feuding militias.

A major aim of the Syrian move is to patch up intra-Muslim rifts and strengthen a campaign to oust Christian President Amin Gemayel, whose ties with Muslims have been icy since he failed to back a Syrian-mediated plan to end Lebanon’s fighting.

The two car bombings in as many days raised fears of retaliatory attacks such as the three car bomb blasts that rocked Beirut’s Muslim and Christian sectors within a four-day period in August, 1985, killing 66 people and wounding 301.

Asked if he thought the Barbir bombing was a retaliation for Monday’s attack in East Beirut, Brig. Gen. Mohammed Haj, the Sunni Muslim commander of the army’s Beirut garrison, said, “Whether it is or not, we are all the victims and losers in this deadly game.”

Army, Israelis Accused

The Voice of the Mountain radio station of Walid Jumblatt, leader of Lebanon’s Druze community, accused the Lebanese army’s Christian-led intelligence department of engineering the Barbir bombing. But it cited no evidence to back up the charge. Muslim leaders accused Israel of being behind both car-bomb explosions.

An administrator at Barbir Hospital, who refused to be identified, reported: “I was meeting with department chiefs when the roar of the blast shook the hospital. We were showered with broken glass and thought the hospital was under shelling.

“Our patients, also assuming the hospital was under bombardment, started evacuating the upper floors. But when casualties began pouring from the blast scene, we realized what happened,” the administrator said.

On-the-Spot Surgery

“Doctors operated on casualties in the cafeteria, in the emergency department, in patient rooms, in corridors as well as in the hospital’s seven operation rooms,” he said. “We suspended the regular surgery schedule to cope with the car bomb casualties.”

At the hospital, wailing women flocked to the emergency section asking about their husbands, many of them pushcart peddlers of fruits and vegetables.

Barbir, Makassed Muslim Hospital and the American University of Beirut Hospital appealed urgently for blood donors.

Meanwhile, the main residential and commercial districts of Beirut’s Christian sector held a one-day strike to protest Monday’s explosion, with schools, shops, banks, cafes and other businesses closed.