Mortars Close Beirut Airport; Artillery Kills 8

A barrage of mortar fire closed Beirut’s airport Thursday, set an empty jetliner there ablaze and touched off a four-hour artillery duel between Muslim and Christian militias that killed eight people and wounded 21.

Shells exploded near the palace of President Amin Gemayel, a Christian, in the hilltop suburb of Baabda. Others crashed into the nearby Christian suburb of Hadet and the teeming Shia Muslim slums near the airport in southwest Beirut.

Airport sources said the mortar barrage may have come from Palestinian guerrilla forces. Christian broadcasts said the fire came from a town controlled by the Druze, an off-shoot Muslim sect.

Police said shrapnel from the mortar rounds sliced through a bus at Hadet, killing five people and wounding 13. Three people were killed and eight wounded in three separate districts of southern Beirut, officers said.

Another Cease-Fire Called

According to police, a committee of the main warring militias and the Lebanese army called a cease-fire that took effect at 3 p.m. Thursday.

Christian and Shia Muslim militia commanders blamed each other for the artillery exchange across the Green Line that separates Beirut into sectarian districts, Muslims in the west, Christians in the east.

It began about two hours after nine 120-millimeter mortar rounds landed near the airport runway, setting fire to a Boeing 707 of the Lebanese flag carrier Middle East Airlines, which had just discharged its passengers.

Airport Closed

Salim Salam, chairman of the airline, said the airport was closed, and incoming flights were diverted to Damascus, Syria, or Larnaca, Cyprus.

Informants at the airport said the impact pattern of the shells was such that they could not have come from Christian East Beirut or the Christian heartland north and east of the capital.

“They came from a southeasterly direction. This makes the Palestinians the most likely source of fire,” one informant said. All the sources spoke on condition of anonymity.

The main Shia militia, Amal, controls the airport. It has been fighting the Palestinians intermittently since May, 1985, in an attempt to keep Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization from regaining the Lebanese base it lost with the Israeli invasion of 1982.

Palestinian guerrillas have maintained artillery, mortar and rocket batteries in the hills southeast of Beirut, using them to shell Shia districts around the besieged Palestinian refugee camps near the airport.

‘Not Shelled by Mistake’

“The airport was not shelled by mistake. Whoever shelled the Middle East Airlines plane carried out an accurate job militarily and used a spotter who maintained visual contact with the target,” said a military source who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine led by George Habash issued a statement denying Palestinians were involved in the shelling.

Christian radio stations claimed the mortar fire came from Chemlan, a Druze town 10 miles southeast of Beirut. Both Druze militiamen and Palestinian guerrillas have artillery positions in the area.

Ground crews were refueling the Boeing 707 for a flight to Cairo when the first mortar shell struck the airport at 9 a.m. Airport officials said the plane had arrived from the West African countries of Nigeria and Ivory Coast half an hour earlier and all passengers had disembarked.

Porters stopped unloading luggage because of the shelling, and the seventh round exploded under the plane’s fuel tank, setting the aircraft ablaze, police reported. They said an airport employee was wounded in the 45-minute attack.

In another development, the Christian radio Voice of Lebanon said that a car bomb exploded just before 6 p.m. in Zahlah, a Christian town 25 miles east of Beirut in the Syrian-occupied Bekaa Valley, wounding 14 people.