An al-Qaeda-affiliated extremist group has claimed responsibility for twin suicide attacks on the Iranian Embassy in Beirut.
The two huge blasts - one by a man wearing a suicide vest and another by an attacker driving a car rigged with explosives - killed 23 people and appear to be part of an intensifying proxy battle over Syria's civil war that is drawing Lebanon, and the wider region, ever deeper into the conflict. They also occurred on the eve of new talks today on Tehran's nuclear programme.
Last night negotiators from Iran, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany prepared for the new round in Geneva. British Prime Minister David Cameron contacted Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in the first such conversation between the leaders of the two countries in more than a decade.
The Abdullah Azzam brigades, a Lebanon-based Sunni offshoot of al-Qaeda in Iraq, claimed responsibility for the attacks, according to a statement posted on a prominent jihadist forum and to the Twitter page of Sheikh Sirajeddine Zuraiqat, the religious guide of the group.
The group is one of of a number of Lebanese Sunni militant groups that have become embroiled in the Syrian conflict, sending money and fighters to join Sunni majority opposition in the country's increasingly sectarian civil war.
