BEIRUT — A large bomb exploded in the heart of Beirut’s Christian section Friday, killing a top Lebanese security official and at least seven others, wounding dozens and spreading anxiety and dread in a city where memories of sectarian violence from Lebanon’s long civil war have been resurrected by the conflict in neighboring Syria.
The security official, Brig. Gen. Wissam al-Hassan, was apparently the intended target of the explosion, which ripped into buildings, upended cars and shattered windows for blocks in the most serious bombing to hit Beirut in at least four years. He was declared dead a few hours after the blast in an announcement on Lebanese television.
As the intelligence chief of Lebanon’s Internal Security Forces, al-Hassan played a leading role a few months ago in the arrest of a former information minister, Michel Samaha, who had close ties with the Syrian leadership and was accused of plotting a campaign of bombings and assassinations in Lebanon. Samaha’s arrest was widely seen as part of Lebanese government efforts to prevent the spread of sectarian mayhem in the country.
Al-Hassan, a Sunni Muslim, also was close to the family of Rafik Hariri, the Sunni former prime minister who was assassinated in a 2005 car bombing in Beirut that Hariri’s supporters have blamed on Syria and its Lebanese allies. The bombing Friday came a day after al-Hassan returned from a trip to Germany and France. He had moved his family to Paris in the aftermath of Samaha’s arrest because he had received numerous threats.
The identities of the other victims in the bombing were not immediately clear, and there was no word on who was behind the blast, which the authorities said had been caused either by a car bomb or a bomb hidden in the street or under a vehicle parked in the affluent Sassine area, about two blocks from a gleaming shopping center. It exploded midafternoon just as the school day was ending.
Suspicion quickly fell on groups aligned with Syria’s president, Bashar Assad, the embattled leader who has long been an influential political force in Lebanon and is close with Hezbollah, the militant Shiite Lebanese organization that is a powerful faction in Lebanon’s own complex web of politics. The offices of two Lebanese political groups that oppose Assad, the Christian Phalange Party and the March 14 alliance, are in the same area as the blast site.
“It is clear that the Syrian regime is responsible for such an explosion,” said Nadim Gemayel, a member of the 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 was elected president. “It is such a big explosion that only the Syrian regime could have planned it.”
Hariri’s son, Saad, who also is a former prime minister, and Walid Jumblatt, the longtime leader of Lebanon’s Druze community, also accused the Syrian government of responsibility for the bombing.
Both the Syrian government and Hezbollah rejected the accusations. The official Syrian Arab News Agency in Damascus quoted Omran al-Zoubi, the information minister, as saying the bombing was a “cowardly terrorist act,” while in Beirut, Hassan Fadlallah, a Hezbollah member of the parliament, said that his organization condemned the bombing and that such acts target all Lebanese.
“Let’s wait for an investigation to reach the truth,” he said.
In Washington, U.S. State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland condemned the blast “in strongest terms.” She said the U.S. had no information about the perpetrators.
The emotional shock and anxiety from the blast had evolved into protests in some areas by late Friday evening, with reports of Sunnis blocking streets and setting fire to tires. Agence France-Presse said one of its correspondents witnessed an angry demonstration on the road between the northern city of Tripoli and the Syrian border.
Terraces on apartment buildings were sheared off by the force of the blast, which shattered glass on structures several blocks away. One car’s blackened and ripped hulk appeared to have been thrown on top of another. Shutters were askew on a traditional Lebanese house across the narrow street. Firetrucks, ambulances, police officers and soldiers crowded the neighborhood.
A number of politicians reacted to the news by pleading that Lebanon not get dragged into tit-for-tat killings or a return to the sectarian conflict that convulsed this Mediterranean seaside city during the 1975-1991 civil war.
“We are all Lebanese,” said Mouen al-Mourabi, a member of the parliament who has accused Hezbollah of sending fighters into Syria to help Assad’s forces crush the 19-month-old uprising against him.
Mourabi stopped short of accusing Hezbollah of complicity in the bombing but said many Lebanese have long feared the Syrian conflict would spread to Lebanon.
“There’s always a danger,” he said. “They’re trying to drag Lebanon toward this.”
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 cell phones were jammed as people spread the news.
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.
In an upstairs apartment near the blast, Lily Nameh, 73, said she had been taking a nap with her husband, Ghaleb.
“I thought it was an earthquake,” she said. “Suddenly everything was falling on us.”
Her husband said, “It felt like a plane landed on the building.”
At The Sporting Club, a gathering place for business people and wealthy residents near the beach, word of the blast interrupted a hazy and unseasonably hot afternoon and many beachgoers immediately left.
The physical scars of the civil war that tore apart Beirut are hardly evident today in the vibrant districts of Ashrafiyeh in the largely Christian east and Hamra in the largely Muslim west. Once strongholds of Christian and Muslim factions, they are now usually peaceful areas full of pubs and restaurants where Lebanese mix freely. But vestiges of the divisions remain evident with posters of the leaders of each sect killed over the years in political violence.
Information for this article was contributed by Hwaida Saad, Hania Mourtada, Josh Wood, Christine Hauser and Rick Gladstone of The New York Times and by Bassem Mroue, Elizabeth A. Kennedy, Ben Hubbard and Barbara Surk of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 10/20/2012