WASHINGTON, 20 June 2004 — The United States has barred US diplomats and other government staff in Lebanon from traveling to certain areas south of Beirut due to security concerns, the State Department said yesterday.
The ban will remain in place indefinitely, and private Americans have been told to steer clear of the same areas where Hezbollah movement, deemed a terrorist organization by Washington, has a strong following, it said.
“Due to a series of incidents over the past month, the US Embassy has placed coastal areas south of Beirut off-limits to its staff until further notice,” the embassy said.
“The embassy recommends that private US citizens avoid the same areas if at all possible,” it said in a notice to Americans in Lebanon.
The embassy did not specify the incidents to which it referred, but Beirut’s impoverished southern suburbs were the site of deadly fuel riots last month in which five people were killed and 50 injured.
Hezbollah chief Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah has accused “groups linked to the US Embassy” of having a hand in the violence, which he said was aimed at damaging the army, Hezbollah and the southern suburbs.
The embassy alert came just a month after the State Department renewed its more general travel warning for Lebanon on May 20, which advised US citizens to “carefully consider” plans to visit the country due to the potential for anti-American hostility. The notice referred to the threat of terrorist attacks targeting US citizens and interests throughout the Middle East, North Africa and the Gulf.
On Friday, after the beheading of a US hostage in Saudi Arabia, the third American to have been killed in the country in the past two weeks, the State Department issued a new regional warning for the entire Middle East.
“The US government has received information that extremists may be planning to carry out attacks against Westerners and oil workers in the Gulf region, beyond Saudi Arabia,” the department said.
Meanwhile, a seven-month-old baby boy was killed and his mother wounded when a land mine, planted by Israeli troops during their 22-year occupation of south Lebanon, exploded police said yesterday.
Wafaa Olayan, 24, was holding her son Mohamad Olayan while watching her brother-in-law Abbas Olayan gathering cardboard pieces to burn in front of their apartment building in the coastal village of Bayyada, police said.
