Rescuers search rubble for air raid victims

Press, 30 August 1984, Page 10

Rescuers search rubble for air raid victims

NZPA-Reuter Beirut Rescue teams worked into the night in East Lebanon to find about 80 people believed to be buried in the rubble of a Palestinian detention centre hit yesterday in an Israeli air raid, police sources said. The sources, quoting the latest police telegrams from the eastern Bekaa Valley, said the rescue workers had dug about 20 dead and wounded out of the debris by nightfall. Further details were not available because of poor communications. Most of the victims were believed to be prisoners held by followers of Abu Musa, leader of the dissident wing of the Palestinian guerrilla group Fatah. An Israeli Army spokesman in Tel Aviv said the target of the raid, the first since August 16, was a guerrilla base used as a departure point for sorties behind Israeli lines. The three-storey building

was close to the town of Barr Elias, on the BeirutDamascus Highway, about 14km from the front lines between Syrian and Israeli troops. Radio reports said the planes razed it to the ground. “Voice of Lebanon”, a private Christian radio station, said guerrilla officers including a former Fatah security chief, Abul Houl, were also in the building and some were dead or wounded. The raid was the most dramatic act of violence in a day which also saw fighting in central Beirut, in the foothills to the south-east and in the northern port of Tripoli. Against this background, the Lebanese Cabinet meets today in an attempt to break a month-old deadlock over plans to extend Government authority . into Druse-held areas.

The Druse Minister, Mr Walid Jumblatt, who is demanding quick political reforms as the price for lett-

ing the Army replace his Progressive Socialist Party militiamen in the mountains, will attend the Cabinet meeting for the first time in two weeks. The Prime Minister, Mr Rashid Karami, told reporters that the session would be in the mountain village of Bekfaya rather than at the presidential palace in the Beirut suburb of Baabda. Mr Jumblatt has refused to go to Baabda because demonstrators blocked his route there last week to press demands for the release of people held hostage by his and other militias. Recent clashes in mainly Muslim west Beirut and on the old “Green Line” facing the Christian east soured the political atmosphere and provided Mr Jumblatt’s opponents with grounds for insisting that law and order should take priority over reform.

The latest fighting in Beirut broke out yesterday after a man was killed in a

gambling club quarrel. One other man was killed and three wounded when rival Muslim militias joined in. The incident was the centre of attention at a series of meetings between the political leaders of the western sector. Sunni Muslim spiritual leader, Sheikh Hassan Khaled, brought together Mr Jumblatt and other militia bosses and later announced they had repeated assurances to get all gunmen off the streets. Mr Jumblatt’s militias meanwhile fought sporadic artillery duels with the Right-wing Christian “Lebanese Forces” around the townships of Shweifat and Kfarshima, Bkm southeast of the city centre, security sources said. In Tripoli, the Sunni fundamentalist Tawheed movement and the pro-Syrian Arab Democratic Party shelled residential areas in a further round of a dispute dating from the late 19705.