Beirut airport reopens

Press, 12 January 1987, Page 8

Beirut airport reopens

NZPA-Reuter Beirut Beirut airport has reopened after flights were disrupted for three days by shellfire. The Muslim Shi’ite Amal militia, which controls the airport, blamed the shelling on a Christian group. Amal said the shelling was from positions of the Christian "Lebanese Forces” militia, which controls east Beirut, and aimed at sabotaging attempts to convene talks between the Lebanese President, Amin Gemayel, and Syrian President, Hafez al-Assad.

“The dangerous aim of this terrorism seeks to sabotage any attempts at a Syrian-Lebanese summit,” said a statement issued by Amal yesterday.

The “Lebanese Forces” denied the Amal charges. Airport sources said a Middle East Airlines (M.E.A.) plane with 25 passengers left for Amman yesterday and another without passengers landed from Damascus.

They expected normal flight schedules to resume today.

Flights were halted last Thursday after an M.E.A. Boeing 707 was set ablaze by shelling. Another M.E.A. plane, a Boeing 720 with 126 people aboard, was sprayed with shrapnel shortly after it landed last Friday. A Saudi envoy, the

Lebanese-born ’ Rafiq Hariri, was expected to arrive in Lebanon today to meet Mr Gemayel as part of efforts to convene a summit meeting Mr Assad, local radio stations said. Mr Gemayel strained his ties with Damascus last January when he refused to endorse a peace plan mediated by Syria to end the decadelong Lebanese civil war. But the Christian President, has been pressing lately to improve his ties with Mr Assad, and last month he sent an envoy to the Syrian capital for the first time in more than a year. Two senior Gemayel envoys went to Damascus on Saturday to discuss the possible summit meeting. A third envoy has begun a four-country Gulf tour to back up Mr Gemayel’s attempts to improve his relations with Mr Assad.

Syria, the. main power broker in Lebanon, maintains about 25,000 troops in the Bekaa valley and north Lebanon, and a few hundred troops in Muslim west Beirut.

• A presidential guard was wounded yesterday when a mortar bomb landed a few metres from the presidential palace in the Christian suburb of Baabda, police sources said.

The origin of the bomb was not kndwn.