Beirut car bomb kills ex-Premier Hariri

A wounded man stands near the site of a car bomb which killed Lebanon's former prime minister Rafik al-Hariri on Beirut's waterfront. Picture / Reuters

BEIRUT - A massive car bomb has killed Lebanon's former prime minister, Rafik al-Hariri, on Beirut's waterfront, witnesses and security sources say. At least eight others, some of them his bodyguards, also died.

Hariri's motorcade was blown up as it passed along an exclusive section of the city's waterfront Corniche on Monday.

The explosion outside the St George Hotel gouged a deep crater out of the road, ripped facades from luxury buildings and left half a dozen cars ablaze on streets carpeted with rubble and broken glass.

Hariri, a billionaire businessman, resigned from government last October but remained politically influential. He recently joined calls by the opposition for Syrian troops to quit Lebanon in the run-up to a general election in May.

"Syria regards this as an act of terrorism, a crime that seeks to destabilise" Lebanon, Syrian Information Minister Mahdi Dakhl-Allah told Reuters by telephone.

Rescue workers clawed at piles of debris across the street from the hotel. Witnesses said at least five people had been buried there by the explosion.

It appeared to be the biggest bomb in the city since the Lebanese civil war ended in 1990. The blast could be heard even outside Beirut's city limits and shattered windows in buildings hundreds of metres away.

Scores of firefighters doused the burning vehicles and bloodied survivors were taken away by ambulance. One fire officer said the total of dead and injured was at least 50.

Current Prime Minister Omar Karami visited the scene, surrounded by security men. Columns of dark acrid smoke rose from the site on a previously clear and unseasonably hot day.

The St George, fashionable with film stars in the 1960s, had been closed for renovation.

BLOODY HISTORY OF CAR BOMBS

Beirut was regularly rocked by car bombs throughout the civil war, when fighting among ethnic, religious and political factions all but tore Lebanon apart.

Neighbouring Syria became the ever more dominant player during the conflict, and its forces took much of the credit for bringing the war to a close.

But Lebanese voices calling for Damascus to pull out its 14,000 troops have grown louder, backed by a U.N. resolution calling for their withdrawal.

Mohammad Jihad Ahmed Jibril, 41, a military leader and son of Ahmed Jibril of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General-Command (PFLP-GC), was torn to shreds by a bomb that ripped through his car in Beirut in May 2002.

Earlier that year, a bomb killed Elie Hobeika, a key figure in a pro-Israeli Lebanese militia involved in a massacre of Palestinian refugees in 1982.

Hariri, 60, had held office for most of the past 12 years before quitting in October 2004 amid a bitter rift with President Emile Lahoud.

Born to a modest family from the southern port city of Sidon on November 1, 1944, the Sunni Muslim Hariri spent some 20 years in Saudi Arabia, where construction deals made him a fortune that Forbes estimated at $3.8 billion (2 billion pounds) on its 2003 World's Richest People list.

Businessmen praised him for cutting through a paralysed Lebanese state bureaucracy and rebuilding war-shattered Beirut. But hopes that economic renaissance would flower with a Middle East peace process wilted with it instead.

Palestinian authority official Jibril Rajoub said the killing of Hariri "serves the enemies of both the Palestinian people and the Lebanese people. We strongly condemn this act which threatens the stability in the region."

Vice Premier Shimon Peres of Israel, which occupied southern Lebanon for two decades, said: "I have no idea who did this. He lived in a dangerous country and they (the Lebanese government) should have taken control over that country. Instead of this they surrendered to all kinds of terrorists."

- REUTERS