Robert Fisk: Blast brings memory of bad old Beirut

BEIRUT - It was the fear that showed most, in the eyes of the security men, the barber up the road, the girl in the florist half way down Sharia Mama -
Mother Street – when the smoke had cleared.

A clap of sound, a man called Mosbeh Mohamed Ali who saw a white car flying through the air, and a litter of human remains, ripped intenstines on the roadway, a right arm in a garage, part of a torso hanging from the smoking vehicle. It was the old, bad Beirut back again, the Beirut of car bombs and assassinations, the Beirut of fear.

At first, of course, we didn't know who the dead man was. The arm was taken away to be fingerprinted, the remains of a mobile phone picked out of someone's garden.

Beirut's top explosives officer – a very intelligent, sharp man with a terrible taste for pink jackets – thought the car had travelled a hundred metres before two kilos of explosives beneath the driver's seat exploded.

Was he transporting the bomb? And who was supposed to die from it?

That's why people in Beirut were frightened. In this city, if a bomb is being moved around, it means a lot of people are involved, that there must be more than one bomb.

Then we learned that the white Peugeot, Lebanese registration number 108790, had been seen parked earlier at a lot behind an antique furniture store at the top of the street. And by mid-day, we all knew that the grisly stumps and bits of flesh across the road belonged to Jihad Jibril, the 38-year old son of one of the great and ruthless revolutionaries of the old PLO and commander in Lebanon of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command.

Now the grizzled old Ahmed Jibril lives in Damascus. So what was his son
doing in the centre of Beirut? Was he collecting explosives or did his
enemies decide to destroy him?

Enemies? Well, there are plenty among the Palestinians – Yassir Arafat and Jibril the Elder have little time left for each other – and the Israelis have no love for the young men of the PFLP-GC.

Jibril Senior's men in Damascus of course blamed Israel. In April, nine PFLP-GC men tried to attack Israel across the Lebanese border – which made the Lebanese very fearful. Last year, Jibril senior acknowledged sending a load of weapons to the occupied Palestinian West Bank.

So there were the usual shaking of heads in Sharia Mama, the lighting up

of too many cigarettes by the detectives. Jibril held lieutenant colonel's rank in the PFLP-GC in Lebanon but was also studying law at a Beirut university. He left a wife and two small children.

"The response for the assassination will be on the same scale," one of his comrades announced ominously.

"But time and circumstances will decide the nature of the operation."

Those were words from the bad old Beirut which we saw in January when Elie Hobeika and two bodyguards were killed by a bomb for which the Lebanese blamed Israel and which Israel, of course, denied.

Sometimes, the bad old Beirut seems to be just below the surface, a few feet below us, at the depth of a grave.

- INDEPENDENT