Camp bombarded, scores settled in Beirut

Press, 25 February 1987, Page 10

Camp bombarded, scores settled in Beirut

NZPA-Reuter Beirut Tank-fire echoed across Beirut yesterday as Shi’ite Muslim Amal militia tanks shelled a Palestinian refugee camp, Palestinian sources said.

Residents reported continuous explosions for 15 minutes but no other details were available.

The shelling was the first serious breakdown in security since 7000 Syrian troops deployed in the Muslim sector of the capital on Sunday, although the move to quell west Beirut’s militia anarchy had already been stained with violence.

The discovery of bulletridden corpses, kidnaps and a seafront shoot-out kept tension high as Syrian troops deployed into many areas yesterday. Amal said it lifted its 19-week siege of Shatila yesterday but witnesses said shooting from inside the camp stopped refugees leaving the shantytown to buy food. The Palestine Liberation Organisation (P.L.0.), which has said the Syrian deployment is a threat to the camps, yesterday called for an urgent meeting of Arab Foreign Ministers to discuss Amal’s conflict with the P.L.O.

The Syrian force entered west Beirut at the request of Lebanese

Muslim leaders after six days of militia battles between Amal militia and a Druse-Leftist alliance that killed 200 people and devastated whole city blocks.

Syria has 25,000 soldiers in north and east Lebanon and has often intervened in the 11-year-old Lebanese war to prevent its effects from spilling over the border into Syria.

The Beirut deployment was the biggest since 1976.

Syria’s chief of military intelligence in Lebanon, Brigadier Ghazi Kanaan, blamed the recent fighting on “Arafatist cliques,” a reference to P.L.O. chairman, Yasser Arafat. Seven unidentified corpses were found riddled with bullets in various parts of west Beirut yesterday, the victims of a general settling of accounts, the police said. Syrian troops shot a passer-by dead after a rocket propelled grenade was fired at them as they raided the offices of the mainly Druse Progressive Socialist Party (P.S.P.) in Ain Mreisseh. Muslim sources said more than 40 Druse fighters were detained there, and residents said seven others were arrested in the Cavalier Hotel minutes before the shooting incident.

Other P.S.P. fighters pulled out of Beirut into the Druse controlled Chouf mountains southeast of the capital.

Amal sources said more than 50 of their men were missing after a spate of inter-militia kidnappings in which residents said both Druse and Shi’ite gunmen were involved. Meanwhile, hundreds of local Shi’ite citizens cheered as Syrian commandos took control of the 40-storey Murr Tower from Amal. Last week, Amal repelled repeated Leftist assaults on the building, which dominates Beirut.

Syrian mechanised units took up other strategic positions and Syrians replaced the Druse tanks that had previously guarded the Soviet Embassy in Mazraa.

It is not clear if and when the Syrians will move into the Shi’ite southern suburbs of the capital, where Amal holds sway.

Security sources said Syrian troops would deploy within 48 hours into west Beirut’s sensitive Basta area, controlled by the Shi’ite fundamentalist Hizbollah (Party of God). Basta has a militia prison where some of Lebanon’s 26 foreign hostages are thought to have been held by pro-Iranian radicals in the past