Beirut: city on edge

Press, Volume CXVI, Issue 34041, 3 January 1976, Page 15

Beirut: city on edge

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright) BEIRUT, January’ 2. The Moslem New Year dawned in Beirut today after overnight incidents in the city which showed howfragile is the present truce between the conflicting Right and Left-wing factions.

However, the fact that today is a public holiday commemorating the Hejira—the prophet Mohammed's flight from Mecca to Medina —will keep most people off the streets, lessening the likelihood of renewed clashes.

Around midnight, volleys of automatic-gunfire rang out in the capital, but this was apparently connected with the Moslem New Year festivities.

Yesterday’s most ominous development, in the light of Government hopes of restoring law and order in Beirut, was the reappearance of temporary road-blocks and kidnappings of the kind which in the last nine months have provoked retaliatory violence. Security forces are trying to obtain the release of'the kidnapped, whose number is not known.

After a clash last night in the shopping and hotel district of Hamra, normally a relatively peaceful area, military policemen of the Palestine Armed Struggle Command detained a group of

gunmen who, they said, had planned to sabotage property in the area. The gun-battle occurred only 100 yards from the offices of "‘An-Nahar," an independent newspaper published by the Minister of Oil and Industry (Mr Ghassan Tweiny), which may have been one of the gunmen’s targets.

Elsewhere in the city, a security forces armoured car fired bn, and silenced, a sniper.

There was scattered shooting in different parts of the city last night, and some shelling in the suburbs of Ashrafiyah (Christian) and Ras El-Nabaa (Moslem). Late last night Radio Beirut said that streets in the capital and outlying suburbs were unsafe after dark.