Bomb Misses Lebanon Ex-President : 3 Bodyguards Killed in Beirut Assassination Attempt

Former President Camille Chamoun narrowly escaped an assassination attempt today when a car bomb exploded as his motorcade drove by. Police said three bodyguards and a pedestrian were killed and 35 passers-by wounded.

“The criminals tried to assassinate me . . . for the fourth or fifth time,” Chamoun, 86, said in a steady voice on Voice of Lebanon radio after being released from a hospital where he was treated for shrapnel wounds on the face and hands. “I believe in the Virgin Mary, whose icon I always wear on my chest. She protects me.”

Police said it was the fourth assassination attempt against Chamoun, a Maronite Catholic, since 1968. He was president from 1952-58 and now is finance minister.

A blue Peugeot laden with 165 pounds of explosives was detonated by remote control at 9:30 a.m. as Chamoun’s motorcade passed by in Christian East Beirut’s Mattahen industrial district, police said.

The force of the blast hurled Chamoun’s bulletproof gray Mercedes-Benz about 20 yards off the road.

“But it miraculously landed on its wheels, and he survived along with his driver,” said one police official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The bodyguards’ car took the brunt of the blast, which carved a crater six feet deep and 14 feet wide in the road, the official said. Twenty-six other cars were destroyed, and glass shards littered the road for a 300-yard radius, witnesses said.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the bombing.

President Amin Gemayel, also a Christian, drove down from his suburban hilltop government palace in Baabda to the hospital to make certain that Chamoun was not in danger. He and Chamoun emerged together from the hospital’s main gate.

Gemayel condemned the attempt on Chamoun’s life as “a new chapter in the conspiracy against Lebanon aimed at destroying efforts to save the nation from its ordeal.”

Police said Chamoun was en route to a meeting of the Lebanese Front. The Front is a coalition of rightist Christian groups fighting Muslims in Lebanon’s 11-year-old civil war.

Chamoun, founder of the right-wing National Liberal Party, invited the first U.S. military intervention in Lebanon to quell a Muslim uprising shortly before the end of his presidential term. President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent 5,000 U.S. Marines and Army troops to the country in July, 1958.

The U.S. troops landed on the beaches south of Beirut, restored calm and departed six months later.