Beirut bombing may have been suicide attack

BEIRUT: The death toll from a car bomb which ripped through the southern Beirut stronghold of Lebanon’s militant group Hezbollah rose to 24 on Friday, and the government said the explosion may have been a suicide attack.
Thursday’s blast, a month after a car bomb wounded more than 50 people in the same district of the Lebanese capital, came amid sectarian tensions over the intervention of Shiite Muslim Hezbollah against Sunni rebels in Syria’s civil war.
Defense Minister Fayez Ghosn said a Syrian man had been arrested for suspected involvement in the July bomb attack, underlining the extent to which Lebanon has become embroiled in its neighbor’s conflict.
Interior Minister Marwan Charbel said investigators were checking CCTV footage taken in the moments before the explosion to see whether the van believed to have carried the bomb had been driven by a suicide bomber or detonated remotely.
“The first hypothesis is that the driver blew himself up, while the second hypothesis says that the car may have been blown up from a distance,” Lebanon’s National News Agency quoted Charbel as saying.
Reporters who arrived at the scene minutes after the explosion saw a burnt-out car near the center of the road, suggesting it was being driven when it blew up. Hezbollah parliamentarian Ali Ammar told reporters in south Beirut the death toll had reached 24, while Health Minister Ali Hassan Khalil said 21 bodies were taken to hospitals and another 335 wounded people had been treated.