Suicide bomber kills 5 on Lebanon-Syria border

5 November 2015, 3:33 pm

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A suicide bomber kills at least five people at a Muslim clerics’ meeting in the Lebanese town of Arsal on the border with Syria, a security source tells AFP.

The source says that the bomber entered the meeting of Syrian clerics and “detonated an explosive belt, leaving five people dead and six wounded until now.”

He says the head of the local clerics’ committee, Sheikh Othman Mansur, was among the wounded.

Arsal is a Sunni Muslim enclave in mainly Shiite eastern Lebanon and hosts many Syrian refugees as well as rebel fighters in the surrounding countryside.

Illustrative photo of Lebanese army soldiers at a checkpoint at the entrance of Arsal, a Sunni Muslim town in eastern Lebanon near the Syrian border, Feb. 2, 2013 (AP Photo/Bilal Hussein)

“The explosion definitely targeted this meeting… where usually no less than 15 people are gathered,” Arsal resident Abu Ibrahim tells AFP by telephone.

He says the committee’s deputy head, Omar al-Halabi, had been killed.

“I just went to the hospital, and there were people crying and screaming,” he says.

Arsal was the scene of fierce fighting in August 2014 between Lebanese security forces and jihadists of al-Qaeda’s Syria affiliate al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State group. As they withdrew from Arsal, the jihadists took dozens of Lebanese police and soldiers hostage and still hold them in the hilly terrain on the town’s outskirts.