BEIRUT, (Reuters) – A powerful car bomb struck the southern Beirut stronghold of Lebanon’s militant Hezbollah group yesterday, killing 20 people, wounding 120 and trapping many others inside damaged buildings, witnesses and emergency officials said.
The blast, a month after a car bomb injured more than 50 people in the same district of the Lebanese capital, came amid sectarian tensions over the intervention of Shi’ite Muslim Hezbollah against Sunni rebels in Syria’s civil war.
A Sunni Islamist group calling itself the Brigades of Aisha claimed responsibility for the attack and promised more operations against Hezbollah. It was not immediately possible to verify the statement, which was made in an internet video.
“I don’t know what happened. It’s as if we were struck by an earthquake,” one young man at the scene told Reuters, bleeding from a stomach wound.
Health Minister Ali Hassan Khalil said hospitals across the capital had taken in 16 bodies and 226 wounded people.
The U.N. Security Council strongly condemned the attack.
