A car bomb has killed four people in south Beirut, the fourth attack to hit the Hezbollah bastion since the Shi'ite group announced its intervention in Syria last year, the health minister said.
The bombing on Thursday came weeks after a twin suicide bombing killed 25 people at the Iranian embassy in the same area and marked a new breach of the tight security in Hezbollah's stronghold.
Health minister Ali Hassan Khalil said four people had been killed and 77 wounded. He said the remains of a fifth person had also been found.
Interior minister Marwan Charbel said it may have been a suicide bombing.
Hezbollah's second-in-command, Sheikh Naim Qassem, called for unity in order to avoid the "destruction" of Lebanon.
The militant group's public confirmation last April that its fighters had intervened in the civil war alongside President Bashar al-Assad's forces outraged Lebanese Sunnis, most of whom sympathise with the Syrian rebels, and has made it a target for Sunni hardliners.
In the densely populated Haret Hreik area, flames and smoke were seen rising from burning vehicles and at least three damaged buildings.
Hezbollah's Al-Manar television aired footage of panicked bystanders scrambling to douse burning vehicles on the busy Al-Arid street, beneath a building whose facade had been burned out.
"The terrorist explosion targeted a densely populated residential area, just 150 to 200 metres away from Hezbollah's political bureau," Al-Manar reported, but said the building was not thought to have been the target.
The Hezbollah deputy leader did not accuse any party of being behind the attack, but did make a call to face "takfiri [radical Sunni extremist] terrorists", echoing accusations by Hezbollah over previous attacks.
"Lebanon is on the path to destruction if there is no political understanding, and we cannot save [the country] without national unity," Qassem told Al-Manar.
Haret Hreik is symbolic for Hezbollah, which once based many of its leadership institutions in the area.
Much of the neighbourhood was reduced to rubble during the Israeli air bombing that accompanied its 2006 war with Hezbollah, but it has since been rebuilt.
Charbel told private Lebanese channel MTV: "We are leaning towards the hypothesis that a suicide bomber [caused the blast]."
The Lebanese army said 20 kilos of explosives had been planted inside a four-by-four vehicle, and that "the method of explosion is being investigated".
Share
