BEIRUT: Lebanon has accused 12 people of planning bombings and the assassination of prominent figures across the country’s confessional divide, a judicial source said on Thursday.

At the same time, a colonel who defected from the Syrian army has been arrested and charged with recruiting Lebanese to fight against the regime in neighboring Syria.

The news comes a day after the arrest was announced of two Syrians and a Lebanese for “belonging to a terrorist network” that was planning bombings and assassinations.

On Thursday, military court Judge Sakr Sakr accused a dozen people, including the three in custody, of “planning to assassinate people in the north of Lebanon and to set off car bombs in various regions... where many religious communities coexist,” the source said.

The accused “had bought guns, detonators, rockets, bombs and ammunition,” he added. The source did not say who was thought to be behind them or what their targets were to have been.

But daily newspaper Al-Akhbar said at least two assassination targets were unnamed figures close to it. It also said there was a plan to blow up a bus carrying Syrian refugees in the north.

Al-Anwar daily said the cell had “constructed 12 bombs to be set off in the main cities” of Lebanon, and also planned to murder figures from across the political divide, as well Syrian opposition figures in the country.