Posted on 08/22/2005 2:53:37 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
BEIRUT, Lebanon - A powerful explosion late Monday rocked a shopping center and hotel in the Zalka neighborhood in north Beirut, injuring at least two people and causing extensive damage, security officials said.
Heavily armed Lebanese soldiers cordoned off the area, punching and hitting journalists to keep them back.
Two workers could be seen helping a black-clad, veiled woman down the glass-covered front stairs of the Promenade Hotel. She appeared shaken but not injured.
Security forces were seen rounding up several suspects, including five men with their hands tied behind their backs. The were taken to a military vehicle.
Officials said the bomb was placed between the hotel and the Moussa shopping center, across the street from the busy Starbucks cafe.
Brig. Gen. Darwish Hobeika, commander of Lebanon's Civil Defense Corps, told Lebanese Broadcasting that two people were lightly injured and one Civil Defense rescuer was hurt.
Residents said black smoke billowed into the night sky near the hotel. Ambulances and fire engines responded to care for potential victims and put out the fire.
Zalka, on the Mediterranean coast, is a mixed residential and commercial area on a main street that leads to Lebanon's Christian heartland. The area has several cafes — including a Starbucks coffee shop — and restaurants and other nightspots that were full of patrons.
The explosion was the latest in a string of bombings that have killed or wounded politicians and other prominent figures in Lebanon since the February assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, an attack that rattled Lebanon's political and security foundations.
Bombs also have targeted commercial and industrial centers. The bomb that killed Hariri took 20 other lives, and explosions since then have killed at least six people, including a prominent politician and an anti-Syrian journalist. More than 50 people, including Lebanon's defense minister, have been injured.
The most recent explosion occurred July 23, just hours after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made a brief unannounced visit to Beirut. The blast in a busy Christian neighborhood wounded 12.
On July 12, a car bomb struck the motorcade of Lebanon's pro-Syrian defense minister, Elias Murr, in a Christian suburb north of Zalka. Murr was wounded and one person died.
Hariri's assassination on a Beirut street, which many people blamed on Syria, triggered anti-Syrian protests at home and international pressure that eventually ended three decades of Syrian domination of Lebanon with the withdrawal of the Syrian army.
Lebanese hotel employees help a woman dressed in the traditional Arab Gulf black robe, her face covered, down the shattered glass-covered stairs inside the Promenade Hotel, in Zalka, in the northern suburbs of Beirut, Lebanon, Monday, Aug. 22, 2005. A powerful explosion has rocked a shopping center in the Zalka neighborhood in north Beirut, injuring at least two people and causing extensive damage, security officials said. (AP Photo/ Hussein Malla)
A crowd gathers at the scene of the explosion that rocked a shopping center and the Promenade Hotel, in Zalka, in the northern suburbs of Beirut, Lebanon, Monday, Aug. 22, 2005. A powerful explosion has rocked a shopping center in the Zalka neighborhood in north Beirut, injuring at least two people and causing extensive damage, security officials said. The explosion was the latest in a string of bombings that have killed or wounded politicians and other prominent figures in Lebanon since the February assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, an attack that rattled Lebanon's political and security foundations. (AP Photo/ Hussein Malla)
There goes that pesky Religion of Peace (not) again.
Eat your own! Bump!
"Two workers could be seen helping a black-clad, veiled woman down the glass-covered front stairs of the Promenade Hotel"
Don't they have to kill her now, for being touched by a man who wasn't her husband?
They said a Starbucks was hit. Maybe the Jihadaccino didnt go over well.
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2003/02/43030.shtml
Story of why Starbucks Beirut was protested against
Amazing similarities that Islam has to street gangs - they just get off on killing - and sometimes it doesn't seem to matter who they kill. Too bad they can't keep it to just killing their own...problem would eventually take care of itself.
A heart warming thing to hear about. Too bad they can't do that here.
(SMILE) Yeah that was my thought exactly.
My God, check out the links on the left! Such a long list of liberal flimflam...sustainability, saving the forest, etc
How could this have happened, there are no Jews or Americans there, just lil ole Muslims. If they cannot resist blowing themselves up on each other, why does the world blame terrorism on the US and the Jews?
Could it be that Muslims are just following their scriptures to be good terrorists, that killing is not due to circumstance but command?
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