7 Die as Fireball Engulfs Lebanon Hotel

A Syrian army fuel truck that apparently lost its brakes crashed into the lobby of a hotel in this eastern Lebanese town, touching off a fire that killed seven people and injured 11, police said today.

The truck rolled downhill out of control into the Kassouf Hotel on Wednesday night, said a police spokesman.

He said the truck “blew up into a ball of fire that blazed across the hotel’s four floors. Most of the victims were sleeping in their rooms when the accident took place.”

The dead included the hotel owner and her two sons and the driver of the truck, police said.

The fire gutted the hotel’s first two floors, blackened the rest of the building and turned eight vehicles in the parking lot into piles of twisted metal.

Initial reports on local radio stations said 45 people were killed, but after the confusion died down, authorities gave the lower death toll.

The injured were admitted to hospitals in the nearby Bekaa valley town of Zahleh for treatment of burns and cuts, police said.

The spokesman said that none of the injured was in critical condition.

Chtaura, 20 miles east of Beirut, is a shopping town on the main highway linking Lebanon with Syria, the main supply route for Syrian troops based in Lebanon.

The police spokesman said fire engines and civil defense teams fought the blaze for several hours before extinguishing it at about 4 a.m.

Syria has 40,000 troops deployed in east and north Lebanon as well as Beirut and part of the mountainous range southeast of the capital under a 1976 peacekeeping mandate from the Arab League.