Market bomb excessive, even by war-hardened Beirut’s standards

Press, 19 August 1985, Page 10

Market bomb excessive, even by war-hardened Beirut’s standards

By

SAMIR GHATTAS,

of

the Associated Press

(through NZPA)

Beirut’s Melki supermarket was turned into an inferno yesterday by a carbomb that, even with Beirut’s history of carnage from 10 years of civil war, was an act of mass murder on an unusually horrible scale. It was 11.45 a.m. Christians from the eastern sector of Beirut were heading for the cool mountains for a week-end away from the violence.

The fashionable supermarket in the Antelias suburb on the coastal highway heading north out of Beirut was packed with shoppers, mainly women, many with their children in tow, getting in the week-end groceries. The bomb, even after a night of heavy shelling and rocket barrages from Muslims on the other side of the city, changed all that in a split second.

The estimated 250 kg of the powerful explosive, hexogene, apparently detonated by remote control, turned the supermarket into a charnel house. Men, women, and children, blood pouring from wounds, lurched out of the black smoke, dazed and disbelieving. They were the lucky ones. Inside, scores of people were incinerated. Great tongues of flame licked out of the market. The car-park, where 150 cars stood, some with husbands waiting for wives, became a field of fire. At least 50 of the cars were turned into blazing hulks. Gas tanks exploded, spewing flaming petrol on to other cars that became part of the conflagration.

There were three bodies, badly burned, shredded clothes still smouldering, lying on the footpath in the debris of broken glass and chunks of rubble.

They were just the passers-by. Five pedestrians were hurled into the Medi-

terranean 300 metres across the highway, by the force of the blast.

At least 10 people, men and women, staggered around clutching wounds and blast-ripped clothes, stumbling almost unseeing through the choking smoke that mushroomed out of the devastated building. In those first frightening moments, no-one knew what to do. They were too stunned. Then, after what seemed forever, civil defence teams arrived, sirens wailing. Men charged into the wall of black smoke to rescue people. Pandemonium. On the balconies of the two upper floors of the sixstorey building where the supermarket is located people trapped by the flames screamed and begged to rescue teams to help them. Help was a long time coming. Ambulances and other rescue units were held up for up to 45 minutes because of huge traffic-jams

on the highway.

When the rescuers came out, their eyes raw and red from the smoke, they carried dismembered bodies in tubular-steel stretchers, many unrecognisable as people. Many had limbs missing. Many were burned beyond recognition. It was a scene from Hell — panic, screams, bewilderment, disbelief, and in the end, horror. -

At the latest count the police said that 50 people, mainly women and children, were slaughtered when the bomb exploded without warning in the three-storey mart.

But the final body-count is expected to go much, much higher. No-one knows how many people were in the supermarket. The police believe that some people were literally blown to pieces. Bodies were believed to be still lying inside the fire-blackened supermarket.

Altenias until now has been little touched by the

slaughter of Lebanon’s civil war, in which, by conservative Government estimate, 100,000 people have been killed. As the blackened remains of men, women and children were carried out of the smoke-filled ruins of the supermarket, even battlehardened civil defence workers and Christian militiamen who have seen it all looked away. There have been bigger body-counts from terrorist bombings. Christian and Muslim fighters have massacred more people than this in the name of their cause.

But few atrocities have so incensed people. The blast that turned a Saturday afternoon shopping trip into a slaughter sickened even war-hardened Beirutis, Muslim and Christian alike. The Prime Minister, Mr Rashid Karami, a Sunni Muslim, said that the bombers, whoever they were, were “wild beasts.” The State-run television

network broadcast what seemed like endless coverage of blackened bodies, incongruously covered in patterned blankets, being carried out of what was left of the supermarket.

All the while, the network played dramatic classical music that seemed to have little meaning in this latest manifestation of the Lebanese madness that no-one seems able to stop. Screaming Christian militiamen in striped tiger-suit combat fatigues, armed with automatic rifles and United States-made M6O machine-guns with belts of brass-cartridge ammunition dangling, fired wildly into the air to clear paths for ambulances carrying the casualties. Drivers did their best. Not always to the satisfaction of the fighters. The militiamen in the end only added to the casualty toll. They shot and wounded two civilians.

Nobody wins in Lebanon. Least of all the Lebanese.