Suicide blast kills 4 in Damascus; rebels seize 12 nuns

DAMASCUS: A suicide bomber killed at least four people and wounded 17 in central Damascus on Tuesday, Syrian state television reported.
“Four dead, 17 injured in a suicide bombing in the Jebbeh district of Jisr Al-Abyad,” state television said in a breaking news alert.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitoring group, said the target of the attack appeared to be a government building.
Suicide bombers have repeatedly targeted the capital in the bloody 33-month conflict pitting forces loyal to President Bashar Assad against rebels seeking his ouster.
Opposition fighters, meanwhile, abducted 12 nuns of a convent from a town north of Damascus, a convent official said on Tuesday.
Febronia Nabhan, mother superior at Saidnaya Convent in the town of Yabroud, said the nuns and three other women were taken the day before from another convent in the predominantly Christian village of Maaloula to Yabroud.
Syrian rebels captured large parts of Maaloula, some 60 kilometers northeast of the capital, on Monday after three days of fighting.
Nabhan told The Associated Press that the Maaloula convent’s mother superior, Pelagia Sayaf, called her later that day and said they were all “fine and safe.”
The state news agency SANA had reported Monday that six nuns, including Sayaf, were trapped in a convent in Maaloula.