Beirut Blast Kills 60 and Injures 190 : Many Children Die in Car Bombing; Shias Claim Control of Two Camps

BEIRUT —  A sedan loaded with explosives blew up on a street in Christian East Beirut during the noon rush hour Wednesday, and police reported that 60 people were killed in the fiery blast.

A police spokesman said at least 190 men, women and children were injured.

Across the city, Shia Muslim militiamen claimed control of two Palestinian refugee camps after three days of heavy fighting.

The car-bomb attack came just as children were being let out of school during the lunch hour in the city’s crowded Sin el Fil neighborhood, Christian radio said.

Dozens of youngsters were among the victims of the bombing, the bloodiest in the divided Lebanese capital since March 8, when a booby-trapped auto exploded in a ramshackle Shia neighborhood in mainly Muslim West Beirut, killing more than 80 people and wounding 250.

No Claim of Responsibility

No one immediately claimed responsibility for Wednesday’s attack. The Christian Voice of Lebanon radio said the blast had the force of about 450 pounds of TNT.

“I was lifted up in the air about a yard by the blast,” said a shaken secretary, Mireille abi Rashed, who was going out for lunch when the car exploded about 200 yards away.

Sheets of fire raced through the street, consuming two apartment houses and trapping some victims in rubble. The blaze cremated several bodies in the rubble-strewn street and turned dozens of cars into burned-out hulks. Some bodies and cars were hurled onto balconies by the explosion.

The blast gouged a 10-foot-deep crater in the street at an intersection clogged with traffic. The explosion ripped the walls off apartment buildings along both sides of the street.

The radio appealed for blood donors to help hospitals cope with the injured.

Scores of people were trapped in the mangled wrecks of their cars. The street was filled with black smoke, hampering firemen and rescue teams.

A 3-month-old girl cut by flying glass lay on the sidewalk beside the dismembered body of her mother, witnesses reported. Several school children were wounded in a bus more than 500 yards from the blast, they added.

Meanwhile, the Shia Muslim militia Amal claimed that it had seized the Chatilla refugee camp in the city’s southern suburbs in house-to-house fighting, capturing scores of Palestinian guerrillas. The Shias reportedly overran the Sabra camp Monday night, after beginning their assault Sunday night.

Drive Aimed at Palestinians

At the sprawling Bourj el Brajne camp, a third refugee facility south of Sabra, the Amal fighters kept up a steady barrage of machine-gun and grenade fire on Palestinian strongpoints, but made no attempt to push into the camp.

It was in Sabra and Chatilla that Lebanese Christian militiamen massacred hundreds of Palestinians from Sept. 16-18, 1982, three months after the Israeli invasion.

Amal has been trying to subdue the Palestinians--most of them apparently pro-Syrian fighters opposed to Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat--to prevent them from re-establishing a power base in Lebanon. Israel’s 1982 invasion destroyed the PLO’s infrastructure in Lebanon.

Hundreds of Palestinian fighters have slipped back into Lebanon through the northern port of Tripoli in recent months, according to Palestinian sources. The guerrillas have been moving in small groups through the Syrian-controlled Bekaa Valley and into Beirut, the sources said.

Palestinian spokesmen conceded that several strongpoints in the two camps were overrun in a three-pronged assault by Amal and by Shia soldiers of the army’s 6th Brigade but denied that they had been overwhelmed.

‘Men Are Still Fighting’

“Our men are still fighting,” one Palestinian official told a reporter by telephone. He spoke on condition of anonymity.

Police said at least 34 people were killed and 157 wounded in Wednesday’s battles, bringing the casualty toll since Sunday to at least 155 killed and more than 800 wounded.

Amal militiamen herded jeep-loads of blindfolded Palestinians, apparently captured in the two West Beirut camps, to the Shias’ main interrogation center in an unfinished 40-story building.

Militiamen in camouflage battle fatigues pushed their prisoners into the unfinished tower block, slapping and beating them, newsmen outside the building reported. The militiamen refused to let photographers take pictures.

For and Against Arafat

The anti-Arafat forces among the Palestinians have reportedly been joined in the battle for the camps by some Arafat supporters, marking the first time that they have fought side by side since 1983, observers said.

In the Jordanian capital of Amman, Arafat urged the Arab League to call an emergency session in hopes of ending the fighting.

He also urged “immediate intervention by the U.N. Security Council to ensure the safety of Palestinian civilians in the refugee camps in Beirut,” state-run Jordan radio reported.

U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar appealed to the Lebanese government and “all concerned” to stop the violence, but there was no indication whether the Security Council would take up the matter.