Reply #3: Beirut blast kills top anti-terror investigator, three others [View All]

[bemildred]

---

The force of the blast, which struck midmorning in Hazmieh on the Lebanese capital's eastern edge, set a dozen vehicles ablaze and ripped a crater in the asphalt two meters wide and a meter deep.

---

Lebanon's sports minister, Ahmed Fatfat, said Eid was on his way home from a meeting at the headquarters of the UN commission investigating the 2005 assassination of former Premier Rafik Hariri. The commission's office is in a hilltop village about a 15-minute drive from the site of the explosion.

Lebanon has been hit by a series of explosions, some of them political assassinations, amid a deepening 14-month political crisis. Friday's blast came a day after a labor strike that was largely peaceful, and 10 days after a car bomb aimed at a U.S. Embassy car killed three bystanders.

---

Friday's bombing was the second attack against the department in less than two years. On Sept. 5, 2006, Lt. Col. Samir Shehade, deputy head of the intelligence department in Lebanon's national police force, was wounded when his convoy was targeted by an explosion in the town of Rmeileh, just north of the southern city of Sidon. The explosion killed four people in his convoy.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/948226.html