54 Die in Truck Bomb Blast in Lebanon City

A pickup truck packed with TNT exploded in a crowded vegetable market in this northern port city Saturday, killing 54 people and wounding 125 in Lebanon’s bloodiest such bombing since the 1983 suicide attack on the U.S. Marine headquarters in West Beirut.

The truck bomb exploded as morning shoppers filled the ancient Bab al Tabbaneh open market in the heart of the city at 9 a.m., demolishing a small hotel, destroying at least 10 shops and about 30 cars and touching off a series of fires, police and witnesses said.

“It’s a real massacre,” Acting Premier Salim Hoss said in a statement. “It was carried out by butchers.”

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack in Lebanon’s second-largest city, but rival factions in Lebanon blamed everyone from Israel to Syrian agents.

Blamed on Civil War

Earlier car bombings have been blamed on the civil war between Syrian-backed Muslims and Israeli-backed Christians as well as other feuds involving Palestinians, Syrians and Israelis.

Tripoli is 50 miles north of Beirut and has a predominantly Sunni Muslim population of 850,000. Bab al Tabbaneh once was a stronghold of a Sunni fundamentalist militia that had repeatedly challenged Syrian troops for control of the city. The militia was crushed in 1986 by Lebanese leftist militias backed by Syrian artillery. The Syrian army has occupied Tripoli ever since.

Syrian troops set up checkpoints around the explosion area and searched cars.

Police sources said an initial investigation indicated the site of the blast was not near the homes of any local political figures or Syrian military installations.

“It was clear that whoever planted the bomb wanted to inflict as many casualties as possible among civilians since there is no military target here. Innocent people were the target,” said 45-year-old resident Issam Abdel Hamid.

“All the people killed here were simple folk going about their daily chores. What links can there be between a vegetable market and politics?” one observer here asked.

Police said the black Mercedes pickup was loaded with vegetables and rigged with an estimated 330 pounds of TNT. It went off as the area filled with mid-morning shoppers on the seventh day of Islam’s holy month of Ramadan, when Muslims fast during daylight hours.

Tripoli’s eight hospitals and clinics were filled to capacity with victims of the blast.

‘Tongues of Fire’

“Tongues of fire shot up into the air, and I felt the earth shaking under me. I fainted,” said Ibtissam Khodor, a Muslim housewife who was shopping when the truck exploded. She spoke from her bed at Nini Hospital.

Nine-year-old Ahmed Touni sobbed as nurses pulled a white sheet over his mother, who died several hours after the explosion from her wounds. “My mother is dead,” he cried. “I have no mama.”

Radio stations broadcast urgent hospital appeals for blood donors. Police said hospital morgues were “packed with corpses, many of them burned or mutilated beyond identification.”

First Major Bombing of Year

Saturday’s explosion was the first major car bombing in Lebanon this year. Five people have been killed and 15 wounded in four relatively small bomb attacks in Beirut and Tripoli in the past three months. But there have been no car bombings.

Last year, 57 people were killed and 288 were wounded in 16 car bomb explosions in various parts of Lebanon, according to Lebanese police reports.

The bombing was the most dramatic since a similar blast ripped through Tripoli on June 29, 1985, killing 52 people and wounding 75. A van rigged with explosives and aimed at killing Shia Muslim spiritual leader Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah killed 82 people and injured 250 others on March 8, l985, in the teeming Beirut suburb of Bir Abed.

In Washington, the State Department issued a statement saying: “We condemn without reservation this reprehensible crime.”