BEIRUT, 18 September 2005 — One person was killed and 28 wounded in a bombing in a Christian section of Beirut late Friday, the latest in a string of blasts to hit the Lebanese capital this year, police said. Police identified the dead man as an elderly Lebanese of Armenian origin and said three of the wounded remained in hospital yesterday. The blast struck just before midnight (2100 GMT) in a small side street in the Jeitawi quarter of east Beirut.
Investigating magistrate Rashid Mezher said a resident saw two young men place two suitcases between two parked cars before running off. Her son, who ran across the alley to warn customers at a nearby cafe, was wounded in the blast, judicial sources said. The force of the blast, estimated at some 20 kilograms (44 pounds) of TNT equivalent, collapsed the roof of the cafe and damaged the facade of a neighboring office block.
It was the 12th bomb attack in Lebanon since the February assassination of ex-Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in a massive car bombing on the Beirut seafront in which 20 other people also died. Prime Minister Fuad Siniora, in New York for the UN General Assembly, said he had no doubt that there was a single hand behind the bombings. “They’re trying to divert attention and point the finger elsewhere,” he told Lebanese media, without actually saying who he meant.
Syria, the former power broker in Lebanon, has been widely accused in Lebanon of being behind Hariri’s murder and others of the attacks, charges that Damascus strongly denies.
Beirut MP Atef Majdalani, a supporter of Siniora’s government, said: “The series of attacks won’t end until the truth comes out about those who planned the killing of Rafik Hariri.”
The blast came the day after Lebanon’s central bank lifted the bank secrecy of the Beirut accounts of eight Lebanese and Syrian figures at the request of a UN commission of inquiry into Hariri’s murder.
“The special commission on the fight against money laundering chaired by the central bank governor has decided to waive the bank secrecy of the accounts of nine figures,” a banking source told AFP, asking not to be identified.
