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Assassination by car bomb in Beirut follows warnings about Syrian ‘spillover’

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A huge car bomb exploded in a street in central Beirut during rush hour October 19, 2012[REUTERS/Sharif Karim]

A huge car bomb exploded during rush hour in the heart of Beirut’s Ashrafieh neighborhood killing at least 8 people and wounding 78. The implications of the blast are multi faceted as concern and warnings about “spillover” from the Syrian conflict have been repetitious. Thus far there has been no determination of who was behind the deadly explosion.

(UPDATE: Lebanon’s Intelligence Bureau Chief of the Internal Security Forces Brigadier General Wissam al-Hasan has been assassinated in the attack, see below)

NYT:

The explosion shook the neighborhood just before 3 p.m., sending black smoke rising over the Sassine area, a wealthy shopping and residential district. Beirut cellphones were jammed as people spread the news.

Residents and politicians noted that the explosion took place in the same area where a bomb hit the headquarters of the Christian Phalange Party in 1982, assassinating its leader, Bashir Gemayel, just after he had been elected president.

Civil Defense officers who rushed to the scene picked pieces of flesh off a security fence and put them into plastic bags. Wounded people, many of them elderly residents of the neighborhood, were emerging from houses, sobbing. One woman walked in a bloodied nightgown.

Reuters:

It was not immediately clear if the explosion targeted any political figure in Lebanon’s divided community but it occurred at a time of heightened tension between Lebanese factions on opposite sides of the Syria conflict.

……

The war in neighboring Syria, which has killed 30,000 people so far, has pitted mostly Sunni insurgents against President Assad, who is from the Alawite sect linked to Shi’ite Islam.

Tension between Sunnis and Shi’ites has been rumbling in Lebanon ever since the end of the 1975-1990 civil war but reignited after the Syria conflict erupted.

….

The last bombing in Beirut was in 2008 when three people were killed in an explosion which damaged a U.S. diplomatic car.

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Credit: Reuters/Hasan Shaaban
 

Politicians are pointing fingers. Yesterday Former Prime Minister Saad Hariri accused Hezbollah of fighting alongside Syrian President Bashar Assad’s forces in Syria. This comes in response to Hezbollah’s deputy leader Sheikh Naim Qassem accusing Hariri’s Future Movement of supporting the fighters opposing Assad’s regime.

The Daily Star:

BEIRUT: Former Prime Minister Saad Hariri accused Hezbollah Thursday of fighting alongside Syrian President Bashar Assad’s forces against rebels, saying the party can no longer hide its “crimes” in Syria.

The head of the Future Movement also strongly denied Hezbollah’s charges that his party was involved in the 19-month-old bloody conflict in Syria.

“The Lebanese – Shiites, Sunnis and Christians – know very well, even from the mouths of Hezbollah leaders, the nature of [the party’s] involvement in what it alleged to be ‘a jihadi duty’ alongside the regime of killings, repression, crackdown and subjugation facing the Syrian people,” Hariri said in a statement released by his media office.

“There is no longer anything that can help to cover up this clear crime committed by Hezbollah first against Lebanon then Syria, especially as it is fully aware that the days of its ally in Damascus are numbered,” he added.

Hariri was apparently responding to Hezbollah’s deputy leader Sheikh Naim Qassem, who has accused the Future Movement of intervening in the Syrian conflict by sending money and arms to anti-regime rebels fighting to oust the Assad regime.

The accusation has been denied by Future MPs.

Four days ago U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice warned of “spillover” from Syria in her remarks at the monthly UN Security Council meeting.  She also called on the international community to “dig deeper” into Hezbollah’s involvement in the Syrian conflict. (see Rice on the warpath against Hezbollah at the UN.)

UPDATE: Lebanon’s Intelligence Bureau Chief of the Internal Security Forces Brigadier General Wissam al-Hasan has been assassinated in the attack.

Naharnet Newsdesk:

Brigadier General Wissam al-Hasan, chief of the Intelligence Bureau of the Internal Security Forces, was killed on Friday in a car bomb attack in the Beirut district of Ashrafiyeh, state-run National News Agency reported…..Hasan was close to former Prime Minister Saad Hariri and hostile to the regime in Syria. He had been tipped to take over as ISF head at the end of this year.

The ISF played a central role in the arrest in August of former Lebanese information minister Michel Samaha, who has close links to Damascus and was charged with planning attacks in Lebanon and transporting explosives in collaboration with Syrian security chief Maj. Gen. Ali Mamlouk.

Syrian Information Minister Omran al-Zohbi, meanwhile, condemned what he called a “terrorist, cowardly” attack, saying such incidents “are unjustifiable wherever they occur.”

…..

Two apartment blocs were gutted, with balconies torn off by the force of the blast. Windows were shattered, cars below crushed by falling masonry and shreds of what used to be curtains dangled from upper floors.

As’ad AbuKhalil at Angry Arab:

Al-Hasan has been tasked with Saudi intelligence of facilitating arming and funding of Free Syrian Army from Lebanon. His name has been linked with the ship, Lutfallah II, which was intercepted as it carried arms to Syrian rebels in Lebanon. This former bodyguard of Rafiq Hariri quickly rose in rank and became the head of a predominantly Sunni security apparatus (Shu`bat Al-Ma`lumat, or Intelligence Branch) which has received tens of millions in US covert funding. Hasan was first suspected in the Hariri assassination because he was absent that day and because he had long-standing ties with Syrian intelligence. He told the Hariri investigators that he was studying for an exam that day.

PS Western media will NOT report another angle to the story: that Hasan’s Intelligence branch has been responsible for catching scores of Israeli spies and terrorists in Lebanon.

PPS This is the third assassination (or attempt) to target chiefs of the Intelligence Branch

(Hat tip Mondoweiss commenters BradAllen and marc b for update)

Video of destruction at the aftermath:

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False Flag operation. Don’t be fooled by the norm.

Check this from Angry Arab Website.
“Western media will NOT report another angle to the story: that Hasan’s Intelligence branch has been responsible for catching scores of Israeli spies and terrorists in Lebanon. “

from the NYT:

“It is clear that the Syrian regime is responsible for such an explosion,” said Nadim Gemayel, a member of Parliament and senior member of the Phalange Party, whose father, Bashir Gemayel, was assassinated in an explosion at party headquarters in 1982 just a few weeks after he had been elected president. “It is such a big explosion that only the Syrian regime could have planned it.”

‘it was so big that only syria could have planned it’? wah? there aren’t any other regional or international actors interested in influencing lebanese politics who are capable of making ‘big explosions’? and i’m not pointing a finger, but there are any number of lebanese militia groups who can make big explosions. (hizbollah couldn’t produce a ‘big bomb’ without syrian assistance? but apparently that doesn’t fit into current narrative needs.) angry arab is right, there’s no shortage of a lack of intelligence in lebanese politics, if that isn’t a double negative.

from AA:

Update: he is dead. It has been confirmed that Hariri security chief (and coordinator of Saudi intelligence work in Lebanon), Wisam Al-Hasan has been targeted in Beirut explosion. A reporter on the scene reports that Hasan has been seriously injured. Al-Hasan has been tasked with Saudi intelligence of facilitating arming and funding of Free Syrian Army from Lebanon. His name has been linked with the ship, Lutfallah II, which was intercepted as it carried arms to Syrian rebels in Lebanon. This former bodyguard of Rafiq Hariri quickly rose in rank and became the head of a predominantly Sunni security apparatus (Shu`bat Al-Ma`lumat, or Intelligence Branch) which has received tens of millions in US covert funding. Hasan was first suspected in the Hariri assassination because he was absent that day and because he had long-standing ties with Syrian intelligence. He told the Hariri investigators that he was studying for an exam that day.

PS Western media will NOT report another angle to the story: that Hasan’s Intelligence branch has been responsible for catching scores of Israeli spies and terrorists in Lebanon.

PPS This is the third assassination (or attempt) to target chiefs of the Intelligence Branch.

Oh Jesus, not the Jumayyals again. Can’t they leave the scene for good?

Very sad news for Lebanon, this bomb. The people deserve better.
They didn’t deserve Zionism either.

The dead chief of intelligence, for the past ten days, has been under investigation for allegedly secretly allowing the release of a stream of captured moslem brotherhooders – giving them carriage back to Syria to fight Bashar. It’s been a huge scandal here.

To me it looks like the dude was damaged goods and the Hariri camp, having been losing their battles everywhere of late, along with S. Arabia, USA, Israel, Qatar and Turkey, made opportune of an expendable with an emotive name.

(How the axis of evil spins erratic and wild when on its last few pins.)

This is bad news indeed nevertheless. But I don’t believe it’s the match that will set the mideast ablaze.

R.I.P. dear Ashrafieh victims.

The last time that someone tried to pin a big Beirut car explosion on Syria, it didn’t go too well, even with John Bolton pushing it to a stacked committee at the UN. Then when that fell through they tried to pin it on Hezbollah. The Hariri investigation dropped off the American MSM radar once Hezbollah started defending itself by exposing Israeli communications.